I am pretty new at all things DVD-burning/converting related. I have a bunch of simpsons episodes that I want to put on DVDs. I've been trying lots of stuff, but I think KDVD is the one that will work really well for me. Each episode ends up being about 23 minutes long. I want to be able to fit a whole season on each DVD, but that may not be possible as there is usually 24 episodes per season. But each season on 2 DVDs would be fine also.
I've read the guides, but I am still very confused. And, some of the websites do not work, so I can't get some of the things that it says I need.

How do I go about beginning to reencode all of these files to be able to work on a KDVD?

Thank you so much.

Or if somebody who is quite knowledgeable on this subject would add me onto their messenger friend list...

yahoo: david_mt_ml

msn: d3r23@hotmail.com

YOu should first learn how to make a KVCD as the principles to make a KDVD are the same, only some settings change.

Go to KVCD.net and pick one of the guide on the right panel.

davidmtml,

This is a great project, I did it with the first season a while ago. I put the whole season in 1 disk. Simpsons is a telecined show (but it's not encoded that way in the original DVD), so I did at 352x240 MPEG2. 352X240 MPEG1 is also good, but since you can't use 23.976 fps on DVDs with MPEG1, it will look jerky.
Anyway, as DialHot pointed, you need to learn the basics first.

How did you put hat on a DVD ? That is not a valid DVD stream and the authoring tool should refuse it. WIch one did you use ?

(I just answered to that thread : http://www.kvcd.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=8156
Am I wrong ?)

Yes DialHot, you're wrong. 352x240 is supported in DVD Standard, both in MPEG1 and MPEG2. But using MPEG2 you can use 23.976, because of the pulldown flag.I could import with success in DVDMaestro, which reinforces the standard and checks all files for compilance when loaded. Read here: http://www.dvddemystified.com/dvdfaq.html#3.4

But I gave up using DVDMaestro and used linux ported DVDAuthor because DVDMaestrto crashes with subtitles on that specific resolution.
I did the simpsons Season 1 KDVD at 352x240, 2 audios (original and dubbed in portuguese) and portuguese subs!

Okay, so I put a link to this thread in the other one

dude it can be done!ive just finshed all 14 season onto dvd ,just encode to vcd then author even if the ouput is 5 gig+, a few of them will be just run your dvd folder through dvdshrink and burn ...simple u may have to burn yuor output from tmpgenc to an image using nero then mount it using nero image drive then recompress with dvdshrink,also using deep analysis does maintain as much quality as possible ,good luck and enjoy

__________________
put your liteon dvdr in the bin and buy an NEC 2500A

I really want to encode and use them as DVD quality, not VCD quality. I use the standard KDVD template in TMPGEnc, should I use all of those default settings, or change some? The only thing I change now is putting it as 4:3 instead of 16:9. Some of the things I have questions on...

1. Once you select the file in the first screen of TMPGEnc, you have the option of interlace and non-interlace. I always just leave it on non-interlace, but I really don't know which to use.

2. The second (I guess third, but the second is grayed out) option is the aspect ratio...what should I choose for this? IN VirtualDub, in File information it says that the episodes are 480x352, 25.000FPS. Data rate = 975kbps...I guess I just want to know general settings for doing cartoons as KDVD's.

3. Same scenario as above two except the next field down on that screen, should I be using Video, Film, or Video and Film mixed?

4. What type of encoding should I do. I've heard that CQ is just as good as using variable bitrate, so what should I use: CQ, CQ_VBR, 2-Pass VBR?

5. Motion Search: Is there a big difference in quality and or time of encoding between high quality (slow), and highest quality (very slow)?

6. Just generally, are there any other settings that I should change from the default of this template...It's the template that I got off of a link from kvcd.net...

from here http://www.kvcd.net/dvd-models.html

1. This depends on your source. If it's 23,9fps, leave it at non-interlaced.
If it's 29fps, choose interlace and activate the deinterlace-filter and "3:2 pulldown when playback", so video will be encoded at 23,9fps but still be dvd compliant.

2. Choose 4:3 as aspect ratio. Since it's a tv series, it's 4:3. You can also recognise this looking at the source resolution: 480x352 is close to 4:3 (4:2,933 extactly)
The 975kbps is divx data rate, right? It's not comparable to mpeg1/2 since it's a way different compression method.

3. I dunno. Leave it as it is, I'm not too sure about what it does. Might be related to source fps or something.

4/5. Since time won't matter to me, I'm always doing 2-pass and "very slow". I never tried other settings, and I won't ever, I guess. I'd just bite my own *ss if I'd save 30 minutes of encoding and spending 4 hours regretting it when watching the video.

6. Other settings? Well, here are mine:

I'm currently trying to ban fansubbed Love Hina series (25 episodes of 20min, which results in a total of 500min) on 1 DVD.
Since I'm doing 2-pass encoding in TMPGenc, I'm calculating the average bitrate first, leaving 100MB for menu:
4400 (MB) *1024 (KB/MB) * 8 (bit/Byte) / 25 (ep) / 20 (min/ep) / 60 (s/min) = 1200 kbit/s
So, if I substract 192kbit/s for mp2 audio, I get ~1000kbit/s left.

1000kbit/s is too low for 720x480, I think.
So I'm doing 352x240, but 352x480 would be okay, too.

I'm doing these settings one time for the 1st episode of a series, then I start encoding and stop it immediately. TMPG keeps these settings, and now allows me to save them as new template.Now I set up all eps with the new template and run encoding in batch mode. (For 25eps this might take a day or two on my OCed AMD 2300MHz)