So, I have a HD with the entire three stooges, little rascals, Laurel and Hardy, and Marx brothers collection (.avi) which I can view on computer. So, what do I need to covert them to dvd so that I can watch them on the TV instead?

Thanks and Happy New year to all y'all.....

I currently use Pinnacle Studio 10.
But my New Years resolution is to switch to Sony Vegas.

This is a bit confusing to use, but it's freaking awesome at video trans-coding. It just about does anything to anything.

The .avi needs to end up .mpg (mpeg2). From there, you need to use a DVD authoring tool. Often, a simple one is shipped with your DVD burner. Might be worth a look at that ignored CD...

My laptop came with Intervideo WinDVD Creator. It's decent. You can setup a simple menu, drag 'n drop 'n crop your video, which it then masters into a DVD. That program will do conversions, but they are not always so good.

The video converter program, I mentioned above, can be found here:

http://www.erightsoft.com/SUPER.html

Reading that guys page is hilarious! He bends over backward to convince you that, yes it really does work and really is free.

I've done video files to DVD, DVD to iPod, and lots of misc. video format changes with this program. It's pretty sweet. Does take some time to grok though.

Damn! It's even longer than when I last downloaded.

At the bottom of this page, you will find the download link:

http://www.erightsoft.com/S6Kg1.html

Ugh!

This will just do video trans-coding, not mastering. You still need something for that task.

I've experimented with using DIVX-formated DVDs. (I'm not talking about that old short-lived "use it once, throw it away" format Circuit City played with a few years back.)

There's a free little program called DVD Shrink

http://www.softpedia.com/get/CD-DVD-Tools/CD-DVD-Rip-Other-Tools/DVD-Shrink.shtm l

(I've not used it but a friend swears by it; I've done the Linux equivalent.)

Anyway, the cool thing is you can burn videos not only to DVDs but to (cheaper-to-buy) CDs, if you can handle a little more compression. Compared to the compression quality of some syndicated TV shows you might not even notice the difference.

The trick, though, is that your DVD player must handle the DIVX format. The old players done. Sony players don't. Philips seems to be the only manufacturer so far to embrace it. (Some Toshibas have supported DIVX too.) Fred Meyer sells a Philips that supports DIVX - I think I paid only about $40 for my player.

The "Shrink" program by the way will reduce down the size of a video to whatever size you want - to a DIVX file. Then you burn that to a CD or DVD the way you would normally. You can use that same disk in a computer or play it on a DIVX-compatible DVD player.

Andrew

IMHO, DIVX is damn cool. It is possible to get very watchable video compressed down to CD sizes. For NTSC programming, this works out fairly well.

On the DVD side of things, it's possible to get really great quality, but lack of universal player support seems to be an issue. I know some people using DIVX to encode higher resolution content, like that found on HD-DVD, into this format, for display on their higher resolution sets. (that's pretty interesting to watch as one can tell the difference between the DVD 720x486, and higher resolution DIVX content.)

DVD Shrink, on win32, is an excellent tool. I recommend it too.

It works very well for limiting the size of video to that which can fit onto a single layer blank DVD media. 4.x GB. For a long while, I used it to make kid friendly copies of DVD movies, and for loaners to friends where I just didn't want to part with the originals.

(yeah, that's a grey area --oh well.)

If one just wants the thing to play, good old MPEG2 is where it's at. Not as sexy as things like DIVX are, but totally useful as most all players will play a DVD-R disc, burned on a computer.

DIVX has changed somewhat, where MPEG 2 is out there, established and not ever going anywhere. Pretty much is always gonna play, period.

I have a DVD player that will play MPEG2 files burned onto CD-Rs (note that I said CD, not DVD). No additional authoring or formatting of the files is required. This is very convenient for short videos, such as some of the archive.org educational films. Unfortunately, most DVD players don't support this.

Authoring DVDs has been more of a challenge. I am constraining myself to using only Linux tools, as this is not something that I want to spend any more on than the cost of the DVD-Rs (or DVD+Rs). I was able to take a MPEG2 video from archive.org and burn it onto a DVD+R disc that played on a Sony DVD player, but not my home player. To accomplish this, I had to do the following to the MPEG2 file:

1) run it through a demultiplexer program to separate the MPEG file into two separate files, one for audio and one for video.

2) Re-multiplex it with a program that inserts VOB (Video OBject) information into the stream.

3) Run the new MPEG file through a program that generates the AUDIO_TS/ & VIDEO_TS/ directory structure for the DVD and creates the appropriate files in these directories.

Despite the hassle, that was all fine and dandy for one video on one player. I then tried doing this to another MPEG video, and I couldn't get past the first step; I think that the demultiplexer program was able to recognize mp2 audio but not AC2 audio....Back to the drawing board!

For the dumbest of the dumb, one can aim a miniDV camera at your computer monitor and burn a DVD from iMovie.

Similar to how TV studios used to make "Kinescope prints" of live TV broadcasts years ago, before video tape became popular (pointing a 16mm movie camera at a TV screen and capturing it on film.......)

Only a lot more high tech. ;o)

All of the live 1950s era video in _The_Edward_R._Murrow_Collection_ is from kinescopes. The quality of these prints varied a lot.

On some, the quality was too good, and the individual scan lines were visible on the film. This is great if the film were only to be displayed using a movie projector. However, if the images on the film were to be captured by a video camera for rebroadcast or transfer to videotape, something called a "Moire Pattern" would appear in the resulting video due to the scan lines on the film not matching exactly with the scan lines in the telecine camera. Due to the imprecise mechanical alignment of the film in the kinescope camera and telecine projector, the Moire patterns move around randomly on the screen, and there is no easy way to get rid of them. For an example, try http://www.wgbh.org/article?item_id=2706452&parent_id=345023
This is a really great interview with Murrow on WGBH's "The Press and the People."

Many kinescope films are blurry, and it wouldn't surprise me if this were done on purpose to prevent the Moire Pattern artifacts. In the Murrow videos, footage that has been kinescoped, telecined, and then re-kinescoped really looks like hell!!!! Barf!

"For the dumbest of the dumb, one can aim a miniDV camera at your computer monitor and burn a DVD from iMovie."

Thank you Steve Jobs!!! As a card carrying member of the "Dumbest of the dumb" club, and as their president I support any move that Mac does to help the dummies of the world feel techy.

A good place to go and learn all about the options and relative good and bad points and all things video, I would suggest going to:
http://www.videohelp.com

They also list and have discussions on all kinds of editors, authoring programs, and different tools. They also list the freebies, sharewares, and costly ones.