Specific CD burner question

Can I use a PC with a CD burner to burn CDs with images, or just audio?

If yes to image burning…

Then, can I take the CD that I burned with images and use my laptop to display those images on my big screen TV, or distribute the CDs to others so they can view them on their PCs at least?
I am working with a new Dell PC with a CD burner, a new laptop with a CD/DVD drive and Super Video output…and a big screen Mitsubishi with Super Video inputs.

(I am very PC knowledgable, but have had barely any exposure to CD burners)

You can use a CD burner just as you would any other disk storage, Zip, floppy, you name it. At my old job we backed up all our archives onto CDs-- that included Photoshop files, JPEGs, GIFs, HTML files, Word documents, PDFs… any electronic file can be burned to CD and opened (though not edited, of course) on any other PC (MAC too, if you burn them in the right format).

I don’t know about the TV part, but my guess would be no. I think DVDs use a specific file format to encode the visual data, in the same way that you can’t burn mp3 files to a CD and pop it into your car’s CD player. But I could be wrong.

Beadalin , thanks for the info. Very helpful.

I am guessing, based on your response and my intuition, that images cannot be displayed on a TV. I’m guessing the SV output/input is relative to DVD format only.

Anyone confirm?

The video output depends on what your video card is. If you have s-video out, I see no reason why you couldn’t display them on a television–I’ve used laptops to display computer output on a tv fairly often. It’s not really that difficult to do. Just check the display properties (right click on the desktop, choose properties, mess around with the last tab, under the advanced button).

Per Beadlin almost anything you can store on your hard disk and play on your PC you can burn to the CD. This includes music and movies stored as audio or video files. You obviously cannot use a CD burner to burn DVDs. Depending on the burner and burning software you can make VCD’s (a sort of video CD) which can be played on some DVD players without a PC.

Displaying PC audio/video output on a TV is entirely dependent on the properties and output options of your PC’s video card and sound card or built in audio/video outputs in the case of notebooks.