I’m a media teacher and I’m preparing a video presentation for a class. I’ve downloaded some short film clips and for convenience I would like to burn the clips onto a writeable CD. Trouble is, I’m totally clueless when it comes to stuff like that and have no idea where to start. Could anyone provide me with some guidance? If it helps, I’m running Windows XP and my only burning software is Windows Media Player. Also, I don’t know if this is relevant but the CD’s I’ve got are ‘CD-R’, whatever that means.
OK, this should be easy enough. Just drag the file(s) to the CD icon on MY COMPUTER and then right click on that icon. It should come up with a menu and one of the menu items is “Write these files to CD.” Left click on that and it should come up with a little menu that walks you through the rest of the process. I think it’s just a single “Yes” click.
That’s it.
Now, if someone could only give me a hand with my Macintosh issue.
A CD will not play an AVI on a DVD player. However, it will store up to a little over 700MB of files that can be played on, or preferably copied from onto, your computer.
Testy’s method will burn the file, but it isn’t any more “playable” than when it sits on your computer.
If you want to convert the AVI into a playable DVD, then you will need additional software, and learn how to use that software. I believe Macs come with software built in that will do this for you, but PCs do not, and you will need to locate free, or more likely not-free, software for it.
The software is normally easy to learn, but can get more complicated the more things you try to achieve.
I think we need a little clarification about how you want to use the CD.
Are you using the CD as storage–i.e. just to transport the file?
By what mechanism will you be displaying the video presentation for the class?
You need DVD authoring software to make a DVD that you can pop into a DVD player (usually doesn’t matter if it’s -R or +R for the blank DVD media) if you want to play the video without a computer. However if you just want to burn files to a CD and then use those files in a different computer (hooked up to a classroom LCD projector, say) then do as Testy said. In that case you are just using the CD to transport the file instead of using a flash drive or lugging around the source computer itself. If you need the CD to play the audio files in an ordinary CD player, that’s a different type of burning software as well. There are DVD players that will play CD’s with video files, so the whole thing depends on what you want to do with the file, and on what equipment you want to do it.
As an aside, there are also mechanisms to transfer large files electronically…
There is an intermediate way, though, isn’t there?: VCD format…might be easier and possibly cheaper than DVD authoring, esp if you have blank CDs but no blank DVDs. I’ve had good success with it.
One format to consider for a casual classroom video presentation is the video CD (VCD) format. Many DVD players can read CD-R discs. See here for more detail:
The OP is a media teacher, which means that his classroom might have a computer hooked up to a display monitor. He may simply be asking how to get the avi file onto a CD so it can be transported to the classroom computer.
Also, even if he only has a regular DVD player, more and more of those nowdays support the playing of avi files. Our player, which cost about 50 bucks, will play DivX and XVid avi files.