making a DVD to use on a DVD player

[spike47]

Hi
I am getting myself confused has to making a DVD to use on a DVD player, the video files I have are in .avi format transferred to my pc form a Camcorder with Mini DV tapes, they have to play on my friends DVD player a Panasonic DVD-S500, I have DVD-R Discs, it says in the (Playing Media) formats for this Player that DVD-R disc save to be in a DVD-Video format and that it has to be finalized, I have Wondershare (DVD-Creator and Uni-Creator).

So the question is do I need to convert the .avi files to another format before using DVD-Creator ?, and how do I finalize the disc has it says in the Panasonic manual, have done one to try ( It wouldn’t play on the dvd player) but there was no unction to finalize on the DVD-Creator or does that do it automaticaly ?.

Cheers
Spike

 

[next010]

If your friend has a modern TV, it should have a digital video player built in with USB ports, so you just convert the videos using Handbrake into MP4 then copy onto a USB flash drive and plug that into the TV to play the video.

As to the DVD yes the .avi files will have to converted into the DVD video and file structure, the software you mention says its does and gives no options for finalizing discs so I'm not sure were you went wrong if at all.

My suggestion is get ConvertXtoDVD, instead its been around a long time, its always worked in the past and will burn a working DVD.

There's also AVStoDVD which is a free DVD author and burn solution.

 

[spike47]

If your friend has a modern TV, it should have a digital video player built in with USB ports, so you just convert the videos using Handbrake into MP4 then copy onto a USB flash drive and plug that into the TV to play the video.

As to the DVD yes the .avi files will have to converted into the DVD video and file structure, the software you mention says its does and gives no options for finalizing discs so I'm not sure were you went wrong if at all.

My suggestion is get ConvertXtoDVD, instead its been around a long time, its always worked in the past and will burn a working DVD.

There's also AVStoDVD which is a free DVD author and burn solution.

Hi
Thanks for your reply, she only has the DVD player to play a video, I would of thought Wondershare DVD-Creator would of done all that needs doing to burn a DVD video disc, but seems not !, I have DVD+R and DVD-R discs, what is the best type to use .
cheers
Spike

 

[next010]

Hi
Thanks for your reply, she only has the DVD player to play a video, I would of thought Wondershare DVD-Creator would of done all that needs doing to burn a DVD video disc, but seems not !, I have DVD+R and DVD-R discs, what is the best type to use .
cheers
Spike

It shouldn't matter DVD -/+ unless its an extremely old DVD player, you could try DVD-R.

But try using the other DVD creation software I linked to, that may make a working DVD, the .avi is just a container and the wondershare software may not have properly decoded the contents.

 

[spike47]

Hi All
Thanks your replies,next010 and your suggestions .
Finally got it sorted ( not easy !) the 60min DV tape was around 12gb in size containing 71 clips, so this is what I did to get what I wanted.
1st: Copied the whole of the 60 DV tape to PC via Camcorder.

2nd: Used " Wondershare Uni-Convertor" to convert to "MP3" I could of used any conversion, but had to choose one for it to be able to be merged", then used the merged button to merge all the clips into one Video file.

3rd: Used "X-Vid", has you suggested, to convert into a DVD-Video file ( it did finalize the DVD at the end, have done it on both DVD-R and DVD+R discs and both play ok on DVD Player .

Note: It quite surprised me that the initial 60min tape was 12gb in size !, but the DVD via X-Vid burned to 3.3GB !.

Cheers and thanks again for your comments.

Spike

 

[MarkE19]

DV .AVI files captured from a miniDV camcorder are uncompressed (well the camcorder does 5:1 compression when writing the video to tape) so as you found is very large. This is ideal for editing as every frame is complete image, so no loss when editing.
A DVD for playing on a TV DVD player can only be made using MPEG-2 video which is highly compressed, hence the much smaller size. This compression removes repeated data from the frames so editing with this will always reduce quality, known as GOP (see MPEG-2 - Wikipedia).

There should be no need to combine the individual clips as the DVD authoring should just accept them individually and set chapters between the clips.
Conversion to anything before authoring should also not be required. Any authoring software should do all the conversion/compression required to create a playable DVD-V disc.
So you should be able to save a fair bit of time if making any further DVD's

Mark.

 

[spike47]

DV .AVI files captured from a miniDV camcorder are uncompressed (well the camcorder does 5:1 compression when writing the video to tape) so as you found is very large. This is ideal for editing as every frame is complete image, so no loss when editing.
A DVD for playing on a TV DVD player can only be made using MPEG-2 video which is highly compressed, hence the much smaller size. This compression removes repeated data from the frames so editing with this will always reduce quality, known as GOP (see MPEG-2 - Wikipedia).

There should be no need to combine the individual clips as the DVD authoring should just accept them individually and set chapters between the clips.
Conversion to anything before authoring should also not be required. Any authoring software should do all the conversion/compression required to create a playable DVD-V disc.
So you should be able to save a fair bit of time if making any further DVD's

Mark.

Hi Mark
Thanks for that, do you know of a good app that will capture the tape to the pc ?.
cheers
Spike

 

[MarkE19]

This is free and will do what you want

WinDV

Small Windows utility for DV FireWire digital video input/output.

windv.mourek.cz

Mark.