Some time ago I got quite frustrated at being unable to get an AVI of last season’s finale of Nip/Tuck burned to SVCD so I could watch in on my TV. In the end, Michelle and I ended up having to watch it in the study on our new 20″ LCD (which wasn’t that much of a hardship).

Well, since then I’ve got a new computer and a DVD burner. So I can now actually create proper DVDs. At least in theory. So far, I’ve had equally little luck getting this thing to burn to DVD. I’ve experimented with just about all of the big pieces of DVD authoring software out there – at least those that I could find via a Google search. None of them have managed to produce anything I could view even on my own computer (as a DVD) – let alone get me to the point where, if my computer can view it, I could test it on my TV (or, really, my NAD DVD player which is supposed to support DVD+RW).

The furthest I’ve got so far is to create the appropriate directory structure – but every time I burn that, the result isn’t recognized as an actual DVD video disc. (Yes, I’ve also tried different burning software.)

I’ve also managed more recently, after stepping back a bit and trying TMPGEnc utilities to break things down step by step rather than going with the all-in-one suites, to create an MPEG-2 file that’s “broken”. It converted my AVI (an hour in length) into something like a 3 hour in length MPG. The last 2 hours are simply the last frame of the AVI. Plus, I can’t move from time code to time code. The AVI itself works great, but not so the MPG conversion.

So, I figure that I need to get the conversion process working first – before I move on to the DVD creation of the MPEG-2 file.

There are just so many variables here, though, that I don’t know where to go. Is it just this one somehow “corrupt” AVI that stopping me from making a DVD movie? I guess I’ll experiment with some other video clips – like, say, our wedding video – to see if I can get that to work. But there’s still something galling about not getting this one clip that I’ve been fighting with for 6 months now to work.