Having bought a DVD+RW drive several days ago, I've been trying to build a DVD to get a rather large video file (the pilot of the Battlestar Galactica remake) off my hard drive. Sure, I've made a Video CD of it, but that's only about VHS quality, at best, but a DVD would be fantastic.

Installing the drive was a trial in itself, involving much swearing, swapping of components and, ultimately, the use of a Dremel tool with a cutoff wheel in order to make things fit. I really need a bigger case, preferably one with water cooling. But I digress.

First, I spent a day converting a big block of AVI video to a single DVD-compliant MPEG-2 file. Or at least I tried to. See, the utility I was using, bbMPEG, has a really annoying flaw: it hooks the keyboard and reacts to it even if it's not the active window. So I was about ninety percent of the way through the conversion when, in a DOS window, I hit the ESC key to cancel the command line I was entering. This also aborted the video conversion. Grrr!

Having discovered that the DVD authoring software which came with the drive wouldn't let me put chapter breaks into one long file, I then spent the next three days converting each segment of the movie, splitting the segments wherever a commercial had appeared. I then loaded them into the software, and discovered... that each individual file was treated as a DVD title, and not chapters within a title. So the previous/next chapter buttons on the DVD remote wouldn't work properly. Arrrgh!

So I downloaded the trial version of Nero 6 Ultimate. Nero 5.5 is what I've been using for CDs, and I've been pretty happy with that. So I gave the latest version a whirl. I love the new CD options, but their DVD authoring is a little basic. Oh, it's nice that I can do all the editing and chapter splitting directly within the program, but the menu authoring capabilities are disappointingly limited. So I told Nero to transcode the video file itself and burn it. And five hours later, it told me that the resulting file wouldn't fit onto a 4.8GB disc. Gaaaaah!

Okay, I went back to bbMPEG and had it convert overnight (no chance of hitting ESC while I'm sleeping!). When I got up this morning, I had a 4.2 GB file. Not bad! So I stuck it into Nero, which chugged through it to make sure it was compliant, and... complained that it was 5.6 GB. Of course, I couldn't look up the problem in the help file, because there was no help file. Gwarrrrrgh!

So today, I went searching for alternatives. DVDlab seems to have everything I need, so I've downloaded the 30-day trial and I'll be giving that a try tonight. The menu authoring system looks fantastic, giving me all the control I could ever want.