I had some rmvb (real.com format) videos that I wanted to burn to DVD. (Rmvb seems to be a popular format with many Asian videos.) In order to burn these videos to DVD, you have to first convert them to a format that your favorite DVD authoring program can use. I chose to convert them to AVI and then use Nero Vision to compile and burn them onto a DVD. After researching different methods, the best one I found was a program called SUPER.
I won’t go into detail on the other methods. If you are interested, look at some of the sites I found: How to convert RM/RMVB to AVI or MPEG1/2, Handling RealMedia with VirtualDubMod, How to Convert RMVB. I didn’t have a lot of luck with the VirtualDubMod and Real Alternative method (probably because I wanted to keep RealPlayer installed) – video converted, but no audio. By the way, videohelp.com is one of my favorite sites for help on all video stuff.
SUPER‘s site is a bit long to wade through, the download link is at the bottom of this page. Before I installed SUPER, I also installed the latest K-Lite Codec Pack, which gives me all the codecs I need for most conversions. The settings I used in SUPER are shown in the screen-capture below. Note that the frames/sec is set to 25, which is the PAL standard. This rate matched the original video and I chose to retain this setting for the converted video to avoid any quality issues when trying to convert to the NTSC rate of 29.97 frames/sec. Most modern DVD players can play both rates without any problems, so it should not be an issue to leave it at 25 frames/sec. (A nice tool to have to see information about your video file is AVIcodec. It tells you video frames/sec, as well as, a bunch of other useful info, such as codecs used.)
After doing a few conversions, I found that one more setting was needed. Click on the little button labeled “Other Opts” on right side of the VIDEO section. A small “Other Encode Options” window opens (see screen-capture on the right). Uncheck the “Adjust The Encode Volume” option. The default value made the audio sound over-modulated. This might be different for your particular video, so play around with this setting and all the other settings, and you’ll find the program to be fairly easy to use and quite capable. One of the most useful things about SUPER is that once you’ve tweaked the settings to your liking, you can batch a bunch of files and just let them convert all at one time.
For those looking for more help, in addition to instructions on SUPER‘s site, you can also check out A basic guide to video conversion using SUPER (pdf), written by someone at videohelp.com.
Have fun converting!
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