How To Get Windows Movie Maker To Burn So A Dvd Player Will Play?

[blkbrd]

New to the video production game. I am trying to get my practices and local matches to burn to DVD and be playable in a normal DVD player but every player I try them in that is not a PC with windows will not recognize the format. Some will see a file but not be able to open it, but most dont recognize the DVD at all?

Is it an upgrade issue with Windows movie maker, an operator error, or do I just need different software altogether?

[shred]

It's a software thing-- Windows Movie Maker wants to make movies in Windows Media Format. DVDs want movies in MPEG-2. MPEG charges a license fee to use MPEG-2. Microsoft doesn't want to pay that fee, so refuses to write that format. There are a lot of 3rd-party DVD authoring tools that that can do it, but they usually cost money.

Here's some quickie tutorials: http://windowsmoviemakers.net/Tutorials/HowToMakeDVD.aspx

http://windowsmoviemakers.net/Articles/Bur...ect-to-DVD.aspx

[Chills1994]

Hey Blackbird,

What type of device are you recording your vids with?

VHS camcorder? Hi-8, HD, or DVD handycam?

I've heard from another forum member that Nero is the way to go as far as video editing and DVD burning.

Chills

[JFD]

Try HERE for a converter that should do the trick. I just checked and MPEG-2 is an option.

I use it to convert the Quicktime movies from my digital camera to Windows media format.

It's free, but with a 5 minute movie limit unless you want to pay. Perfect for my videos of stages.

[George]

Buy Nero, it really is the easiest way on the Wintel platform.

Forget Win Movie Maker, it's a lousy way to make anything "video" for many, many reasons.

[shred]

Forget Win Movie Maker, it's a lousy way to make anything "video" for many, many reasons.

I dunno.. I've used WMM 2.0 to edit a couple DVDs (Nationals and World Shoot) and a bunch of internet videos. Nothing major wrong with it and it's free for Windows users. I tried half a dozen of the "consumer" video editing programs for PCs and none of them were near as usable. If I dropped a ton of $ on something nice, maybe that would be better, but then the work level gets even worse. All you need is to work in DV and convert to DVD at the last step..

[George]

WMM trashes video quality when it converts to WMV. If you only view the files in WMM you will never know, but if you capture into a program that saves in mpeg you will understand.

Take an mpeg file that looks pretty good (crisp color, good detail, decent motion definition), import it into WMM and compare the quality of the clip after it has been converted to a WMV file by WMM. On this result alone I rest my case ;-)

[Chills1994]

+1 to what George said on the resolution of mpegs before vs. the .wmv conversion after.

It SUX!

[shred]

WMM trashes video quality when it converts to WMV. If you only view the files in WMM you will never know, but if you capture into a program that saves in mpeg you will understand.

Take an mpeg file that looks pretty good (crisp color, good detail, decent motion definition), import it into WMM and compare the quality of the clip after it has been converted to a WMV file by WMM. On this result alone I rest my case ;-)

Hence why I keep files in native DV while editing. Works great. Converting from one lossy codec to another is a guaranteed loser, no matter which you use, so only do it when you have to.