I have some .avi files that I’d like to view on my tv. My friend has a DVD burner he never uses, but he’d let me use.
I know all about burning cds, but how do I burn a dvd so it plays on my tv? Is there a standard program that will do it?
Thanks.
You would first need to convert the AVI files to something a DVD player would recognize. Most revert to a transport stream (.TS) after being decrypted, so that would be the easiest. An MPEG-2 (.MPG) file may work, but it would depend on the DVD player you are using.
How do I do any of this though? I don’t know how to convert things. I hear people do these things all the time, so it must be done.
Indeed they do.
I would just use Nero, tell nero 5.5.6 or higher to make a vcd or svcd & drag the file to the window & nero would
look at it & convert it to the right format, if necessary, & make the cd. Just tried it & sure enough thats all there is to it.
A dvd would work the same way., I guess.
The Short Answer: If you’re talking about stuff you downloaded off the Net, the savvy strategy would be to buy the original DVDs from Amazon or eBay because it’s less expensive and far less difficult than the alternative.
The Long Answer: Anything you download off the Net is essentially a finished work intended exclusively for PC playback. DVD has rigid specifications that the video must meet in order to be recorded in that format, namely:
NTSC MPEG-2 CBR or VBR up to 9Mb/S; 1/2-D1 (352x480), D1 (704x480) or CCIR-601 (720x480) video resolution; 48KHz stereo PCM audio (48KHz stereo AC3 optional).
If your data doesn’t already meet these specs (and if it’s compressed using the DivX or WMV codec you can be 100% certain it doesn’t) the data has to be transcoded before an authoring program will allow you to use it. This is not a trivial operation. Most hobbyists need between 6 and 18 months to accumulate the experience necessary to do this kind of work reliably, more or less depending on how much background in television theory they have to start with.
DivX and WMV do very wicked things to compress video to downloadable sizes, and not everything they do can be undone. Variable frame rates, for example, must be brought up to a constant 29.97fps for television playback, in which case audio synchronization may be impossible.
But DVD isn’t the only format on the block. There is Video CD and Super Video CD, formats that can store between 30 and 90 minutes of digitally-encoded video on a CD-ROM that the majority of DVD players built after 1999 will play. These formats are usually what hobbyists cut their teeth on before tackling full DVD as the underlying principles are the same, yet certain specs (such as allowable resolutions of 1/4-D1 (352x240) and 2/3-D1 (480x480) with 44KHz MP2 stereo audio) are closer to the format you’re likely to be starting with.
If you’re interested, forums like VCD Help are invaluable places to start.
Ignore handy. A file can be an mpeg that doesn’t meet spec and there’s no way Nero would burn an AVI - even if sampling/frame rates were correct - as a VCD or a SVCD that would play in a DVD player.
You’re better off getting a video card with TV out and hooking it up to your TV. No muss, no fuss. (No surround sound either, most likely, but that’s besides the point.)
All you need to know, includinf step by steo illustrated instructions can be found here along with free software to do it. www.vcdhelp.com
"Ignore handy. A file can be an mpeg that doesn’t meet spec and there’s no way Nero would burn an AVI
"
You missed what I said. I said that I took an AVI file right then at the moment I read the question,
ran Nero & created a vcd with it. I suggest you try it, it works for me.
The AVI file format is essentially a “container” for video data that doesn’t specify or impose a particular compression scheme on its contents – you’re free to use any codec (coder/decoder) you like. Thus the video data inside the AVI may be encoded as 24-bit RGB, 9-bit YUV, Motion JPEG, Cinepak, Indeo, DivX or a variety of other formats.
Codecs are installed individually and act as extensions to the operating system, allowing any program that can handle AVIs to handle AVIs encoded using that codec. Nero contains an integrated MPEG-1 encoder that recognizes AVI as a file type, so provided the appropriate codec is installed on the system it may very likely convert the random downloaded AVI into a format it can burn as a VCD.
However
Unless the original AVI was intended for television, the resolution, aspect ratio, frame rate, audio format and other parameters are going to be wholly unsuitable for that purpose. The encoder can fudge these by enlarging the picture, ignoring the aspect ratio, interpolating missing frames and dropping the audio, but the finished result is going to be horribly artifacted, shape-distorted, jerky and quite possibly silent as a result.
As mblackwell stated, there are handy-dandy guides available there that purport to show you how to turn a second-rate DivX into a glorious VCD that looks better than the DVD it was ripped from, but caveat emptor. The standard procedure is to rent a DVD and transcode its contents to [S]VCD directly; transcoding from DivX to [S]VCD is almost never worth the trouble.