> Back in pre-LLM days, it's not like I would have hired a x264 expert to do this job for me. I would have either had to spend hours more on this task, or more likely, this 97 year old man would never have seen his great granddaughter's dance
Didn't most DVD burning software include video transcoding as a standard feature? Back in the day, you'd have used Nero Burning ROM, or Handbrake - granted, the quality may not have been optimized to your standards, but the result would have been a watchable video (especially to 97 year-old eyes)
Back in the day they did. I checked handbrake but now there's nothing specific about DVD compatibility there. I could have picked something like Super HQ 576p, and there's a good chance that would have sufficed, but old DVD players were extremely finicky about filenames, extensions, interlacing, etc. I didn't want to risk the DVD traveling half way across the world only to find that it's not playable.
I mentioned Handbrake without checking its DVD authoring capability - probably used it to rip DVDs many years ago and got it mixed up with burning them; a better FLOSS alternative for authoring would have been DeVeDe or bombono.
Didn't most DVD burning software include video transcoding as a standard feature? Back in the day, you'd have used Nero Burning ROM, or Handbrake - granted, the quality may not have been optimized to your standards, but the result would have been a watchable video (especially to 97 year-old eyes)