One of our objectives is to make a family picture CD to collect all the pictures we take with our digital camera. The camera also records video clips and I’d like to save those as well on the CD. So far, I’ve just been transferring the pictures and clips to a CD but have not finalized the CD session yet. When we play this non-finalized CD in our DVD player, we can see the pictures on the TV screen but the video clips will not run. I don’t want to finalize the CD with the clips in the wrong format. The “Properties” screen for each clip says that they are currently in AVI Video format. How am I doing so far? What do I need to be aware of? Any input and help from smart people would be appreciated.
You need to convert the AVI files to MPEG-1 files. The MPEG files should play on your DVD player.
Use TMPGEnc to convert the AVI file to an MPEG-1 file. The demo version of TMPGEnc is free. There is a TMPGEnc-Plus version that is commercial and has more features. See Pegasys Inc for more info about the Plus version. The free demo version will do what we need to do to make an MPEG-1 file.
The format you want to make is called a Video-CD. A Video-CD file is an MPEG-1 file. DVD movies are MPEG-2 files. MPEG-1 is older technology and not as high quality as MPEG-2, but MPEG-1 will still play on many DVD players.
Start TMPGEnc. It will start up with a project wizard. Select Video-CD >> NTSC. Follow the Wizard through. It will ask you for the input file and some other stuff. Give it the AVI file as an input file. At the end it will encode the AVI file to an MPEG-1. Put that MPEG-1 file on a CD and you have a Video-CD. Hopefully your DVD player will be able to play it.
to make video’s work on a DVD is a very long and complicated process, unless you have a program that does so; i.e. Nero Vision Express 2. But that program doesn’t always do it.
If you want to play it on a DVD player you have to go through quite a lengthy process demuxing first with PVAStrumento then using TMPGEnc Plus 2.5 to produce a standard DVD quality Mpeg2 file which then needs to go through an authoring program such as Vision Express to produce the VOB files ready for burning onto DVD.
I suppose what I’m trying to say is it might be better saving your captured files as Mpeg2 files and not AVI’s (which are usually enormous anyway)
Your best bet it to buy a DVD Recorder which might even end up being the best bet as you won’t have to go through all the post processing afterwards (in theory).
I’ve probably not answered your question but try as many options as you can.
Good luck with it all, you may be confused from what I just posted, but I tried.
-Toby
PS
Go to download.com and try finding the above mentioned programs. One for sure I know is freeware and the other is a trial.
If they won’t automatically play, you may need to select a menu item in order for it to work. Not sure if thats the problem but if it comes up on your tv it should work.
Thanks, guys. Your input as always is real helpful. I’m convinced more each day that unicyclists are among the smartest people on earth.
I thought I heard once upon a time of an old Chinese proverb that eluded to something like “body balance is the key to intelligence” but I’ve long since lost the reference.
