Burning onto a DVD-R and playing it in my DVD player

[Jerry98vert]

Want I want to do is, I'll use an example, record a tv show onto the hard drive and then burn it on a DVD-R and play it on my home DVD player, not the computer's DVD player.

I want to do the same thing with some HI-8 camcorder stuff.

Is it a program that does this easily, I just can't burn the file the computer creates when I record a tv show, so how does all this work?

[Xayd]

You're right it's not that easy. DVDs have a specific format that is required before they will play in a DVD player.

You have 2 things to consider.

1) your MPEG encoder, DVDs are MPEG 2 and even if you're capturing at MPEG 2 you're probably doing so at a very high bitrate, so will want to shrink down what you've captured a bit to fit more on one disk.

2) DVD Authoring software. You can spend from 60 to 30,000 dollars on DVD authoring software, hehe. If you wanna tinker a bit, IfoEdit (download from doom9.org) is free and can author a basic DVD with no menus and no subtitles. If you want something more intuitive take a look at products like Sonic MyDVD.

Note: All software based MPEG encoders are not created equal. There's CCE, then there's TMPGENC, then there's a serious dropoff in quality, then there's the rest of them out there including the ones that come with point and click DVD creation apps. The folks who make the TMPGENC MPEG encoder also make a DVD authoring app, so you might see if they have a package deal where you can get both at a discount and kill two birds with one stone.

http://www.cinemacraft.com
http://www.tmpgenc.net
http://www.doom9.org

[bailey]

I have no problem doing the very same thing with the all in wounder ati video card.
saves the captured stuff to the hard drive and then I burn it to a dvd-r with nero, its very simple

[Jerry98vert]

Thanks I'll look into all of this, I do have a sony laptop with sonic, but the cd is not a dvd burner. I do have my desktop and laptop network and can use the desktop, but I don't know what version of sonic I have.