Hatrack River Forum: Burning DVDs

This is topic Burning DVDs in forum Books, Films, Food and Culture at Hatrack River Forum.

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Posted by Portabello (Member # 7710) on :

Is there a free program out there that will let me take a video file off of my computer and burn it to a DVD that can be played in a normal DVD player?

If not, what commercial software can do this for me?

Posted by pfresh85 (Member # 8085) on :

Toast is the one that comes to mind (for PCs) as far as burning any type of movie file to DVD and being able to play it on a normal DVD player. I think it's a purely commercial program though; it may not even have a free trial. Sorry that I'm not more helpful.

Posted by neo-dragon (Member # 7168) on :

There's a program called "Nero", but it's not free. Well, at least not if you want to stick to legal methods of obtaining it. Most CD burning programs will allow you to burn DVDs as well. Also note that most video files can't simply be burned onto a DVD and viewed on a standard player as they are. They usually have to be converted to a DVD video format. I believe the proper name is MPEG-2 or something like that. Most video files which I'm familiar with have a ".avi" extension. These can be easily converted to MPEG-2 with the proper software.

Posted by Lanfear (Member # 7776) on :

DVD Shrink. The DVD shrink program is originally intended for you to shrink 8gb files to 4.7gb for the dvd r. But it also burns it at the end of the operation.
I dont think the program is legal but its free

Posted by unicornwhisperer (Member # 294) on :

Sony's Sonicblast was only $60 and I love it! Steer away from Pinnacle... too many bugs!

Good luck with makding DVDs.. I enjoy doing it but sometimes you need extra DVDRs because sometimes they don't work out... [Grumble]

Posted by Portabello (Member # 7710) on :

DVD Shrink doesn't do it -- the files already have to be in DVD format.

I want to be able to take an .avi or a .mpg file and burn it to a DVD.

I have Nero, but it won't let me author video DVDs.

quote:
Most video files which I'm familiar with have a ".avi" extension. These can be easily converted to MPEG-2 with the proper software.

Right. I am trying to find out what this proper software is.

Posted by Kwea (Member # 2199) on :

MPH, I thought you could do that with Nero, but I have never tried...you might want to look at a guide or two, there are some very god guides out there.

I used VSO_DVIXtoDVD, a freeware program, and it worked great. I used it to copy files that were in a different, unreadable format on my hard drive (unreadable by my new DVD player, anyway...the computer read it fine... [Big Grin]

) to make very good DVD's that my DVD player read fine. I supports many different formats too....and is freeware.... [Big Grin]

Also, I believe DVDdecrypter allows you to reauthor tracks, but you have to play around in the Files option, and chage it from Read to Write...it is a little bit hidden.

This program is great, and fairly easy to use, once you find that File thing and how to change it.. [Big Grin]

Here is the site for the download of DIVXtoDVD...

And here is one to DVDDecrypter.

Hope that helps.

Kwea

[ May 26, 2005, 08:20 AM: Message edited by: Kwea ]

Posted by IanO (Member # 186) on :

Working on that right now, as a matter of fact. NeroVision express will let you author DVDs with movie files (and create their menu system.) So will Roxio's DVD Builder (and is quite easy to use.) Only problem is that I had a mpeg of 800MB. Somehow Roxio turned that into an ISO of 10GB(!!). So now I'm using NeroVision to see if it does the same thing. If it does, I'll use DVDShrink to see if I can get the thing down to a reasonable size for DVD.

Posted by fugu13 (Member # 2859) on :

I'm certain there's free software out there that can do this, though not sure where, but --

As far as commercial software goes, Quicktime Pro is one of the most versatile converters of video formats for cheap, and'll get it into DVD's preferred format so you can use some of the burning software already mentioned.

Of course, if you were on a mac you'd be all set up to do this from the get-go -- edit your movie in iMovie, then burn your DVD with custom menus and whatnot in iDVD [Wink]

Posted by Portabello (Member # 7710) on :

If you get it figured out, please let us know. [Smile]

Posted by IanO (Member # 186) on :

As I said, you CAN do this with DVDBuilder and NeroVision, both of which are easy to use (though you have to buy them. Roxio's is actually part of a suite of Media building software- Media Center? Something like that). Just not sure of the size of the resulting files. Mine may have been a fluke (it's a 2 hour movie.)

Posted by HollowEarth (Member # 2586) on :

Sorry if this is a thread hijack, but does anyone know of decent free software for burning cds?

Yes nero has a free trial, but for as rarely as I use it, it is a pain to have to download the trial again and again.

I've been using a windows port of cdtools (mksisofs, cdrecord and friends) and while this works, its somewhat more hands on that I would like.

Anyone?

Posted by IanO (Member # 186) on :

I believe XP can handle DVDs as simple data disks (as it does with CDs). Not sure, though.

DVD burn is proceeding nicely. The total size (including menu system) is 2GB. This was using NeroVision. Not as easy to use as DVD Builder, but considering the total size difference, it was worth the learning curve.