DVD writing?

[Dustin Decker]

On Mon, 10 Feb 2003, Bradley Miller wrote:

> Actually I believe the products that are touted for that type of thing 
> actually compress the DVD video into such a tiny size (at significantly 
> less quality) that it will fit on a typical CDR/W.   I played around with 
> making DVD videos (of hundreds of digital pics) and burning them to CDR's 
> for X-Mas presents for the family.  (Most of the grandparents got VHS tapes 
> . . . no DVD players!)

Oh - I guess I should have read the _whole_ post.  I get the impression we 
might actually be talking about a VCD here.  The wife and I bought a nice 
Canon DVR camera just before Christmas, and the Firewire card I picked up 
to capture video with came with a few software titles that do something 
along these lines.  I capture the video, and if I have a DVDR, I can 
certainly burn my own DVDs.  But since I don't, I have to option of 
creating a VCD on regular CDRW media.

They _do_ play well in a regular DVD player, provided it supports VCD.  We 
picked up a VHS/DVD combo at Costco from SonicBlue after Spencer destroyed 
the second VCR he's managed to get his grubbers on.  (Can you say 
"Time Out!" ?)  It supports this, and the picture looks nice.  What was 
most confusing is the encoding format - I burned two or three of these 
_before_ I had a DVD player, and took a look at the contents of the disk I 
had burned.  It didn't look like anything I could play with the software I 
had available... just a bunch of files that meant very little to me at the 
time.  I anticipated the "free" software that shipped with the Firewire 
card was junk - until I actually put one in a DVD player.

At any rate, I recalled my experience with this, and immediately thought 
this might be confusing someone else too.  If you burn a VCD, and want to 
play it via Windows Media Player, WinAmp, or what have you, you will 
likely be disappointed and think the disk is no good.  Put it in a DVD 
player and see what happens.  :)

I hope this helps out - it sure confused the hell out of me at first.
D.

P.S. Oh yeah - my stuff had to be backward compatible for folks at 
Christmas too.  We gave out video on CDs that was just plain old MPEG2 
encoded, but the grandparents needed VHS as well.  But hey, at least 
we got them on e-mail this year!.  <grin>

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