Good way to capture DV stream and burn to DVD

[matturn]

I would like to capture a DV stream on a PC via i.Link (firewire) from a Sony camcorder; then without any editing, burn this recording to a DVD as soon as possible afterward.

What's a good way to do this?

[Ghitulescu]

Use any 1Click DVD software, most of them acquire the DV stream from firewire. Or the one bundled with your firewire card.

Of couse, the more reasonable videoeditors can do this too, just skip the editing part in the wizard.

[Ghitulescu]

Or buy yourself a DVD recorder with firewire input. :p

[matturn]

1DVD Copy doesn't appear to be able to handle live streams, and neither do the other 1DVD products.

Windows Movie Maker and AMCap are the best free/cheap options I can find. Both will capture the video in formats that can be transcoded to DVD video.

However, I would like to avoid transcoding beyond a single DV>MPEG-2 conversion, and I don't want to record the DV stream as is for hard drive capacity reasons.

Of the two programs mentioned, I would prefer to use Windows Movie Maker. I note that users can select between DV-AVI and WMV formats. I know how to create different WMV profiles, but how can one add a suitable MPEG-2 option?

I can work out how to use such an option in AMCap, but I don't know of a suitable MPEG-2 code to install. What would be a good one?

[Ghitulescu]

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=1309558#post1309558

Buy yourself a DVD recorder with DV-in. You won't regret.

[bb]

If you prefer a software solution, then I'd like to recommend MainConcept MPEG Encoder, which is a very good MPEG-2 encoder, and it has a DV module. You can directly read DV via firewire, encode to MPEG-2 on the fly, and save a program stream to your hard disk. You still need an authoring program, though, to create the DVD structure (menus, VOBs, etc.).

Some cheap NLE solutions like Ulead VideoStudio might fit your needs, too.

bb

[Ghitulescu]

If you prefer a software solution, then [...]

Some cheap NLE solutions like Ulead VideoStudio might fit your needs, too.

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Ulead is usually bundled with various devices, I've got one copy with my FireWire card, another one with my DVD writer, I think I also have a copy that came with a certain PC magazine, and so on...

[fvisagie]

Windows Movie Maker and AMCap are the best free/cheap options I can find.

It seems the rats gnawing at the Internet caused my message to get dumped, so here goes again.

For capturing you can also try STOIK Capturer or VirtualDub. Both have small footprints, have very little overhead and are rock-solid. And with both you can encode to the Lagarith lossless codec. It provides amazing compression with zero quality loss, perfect for any processing you have in mind.

[matturn]

Thanks everyone for your suggestions.

AVS Capture Wizard (aka Video Recorder) is a good option. It captures, transcodes and burns without much fuss.

STOIK Capturer is great too (and US$59 cheaper for non-commercial use).

While I was looking for something that captured, burnt and transcoded all in one go (like AVS), I'm now thinking that it might be better just to capture, and then burn later. (Still with no editing, menus or anything). STOIK would be great for this.

With this in mind, I would like STOIK (or a similar program) to record to a version of MPEG-2 that requires as little changing as possible to burn to DVD. How might this be done?

I'm looking for something I can run without changing any settings at the time - writing a reusable config, batch or similar file beforehand is fine though.

[Ghitulescu]

For capturing DV I always used WinDV: small (1 EXE), no install, no registry, free, splits at TC discontinuities (scene changes) etc.