Burning Movies to a DVD

[joroho]

My brother has asked me to download a few John Piper sermons from their website and burn them to a DVD. I'm totally confused. It appears that I'll need three programs: a video editor, an encoder (whatever that does?), and a DVD author. Are all three really necessary? Anybody have exerience doing this sort of stuff and can point me in the right direction?

.joel.

[Soquili]

Joel if you have Windows XP SP2 or Vista you have Windows Movie Maker.

You can use that to do all you need to put the files onto DVD disc.

[steve.ledger]

From Windows Vista Ult Help: To publish and burn a movie to a DVD, you must have Windows DVD Maker, which is included in Windows Vista Ultimate and Windows Vista Home Premium. You also need a DVD burner.

IOW: Depending on which OS you are using, and what hardware you have, you may only be able to save .AVI or .wmv files with Windows Movie Maker. These files will not play in a standard Home DVD player, although players that can read DivX/Xvid encoded .avi files are becoming more common.

Anoth issue is that the JP Sermons I looked for are encoded with an .mp4 codec (similar to .mp3 but for Video)
Windows Movie Maker cannot import .mp4 encoded video - so you would need to convert this first to a format that WMM can understand.
There's a very easy to use FREEWARE converter available to accomplish this.

Working with Video is often not as straight forward as some people expect.
However, it is always fun..

[Soquili]

If you need an mp4 decoder for windows media player/movie maker http://www.bitctrl.de/bcshop/product...29&language=en

It cost about $22.00 USD (13.23EUR). EDIT: actual purchase price was 11.56EUR just a few minutes ago.

To open .mp4 files in Windows Movie Maker you need to use the All Files option of the import dialog or simply drag and drop from Windows Explorer. With out an .mp4 decoder only the audio will be played/recorded.

If you have Nero Ultimate 7 or 8 you can burn the mp4 files to DVD using the Nero codec.

[steve.ledger]

If you have Nero Ultimate 7 or 8 you can burn the mp4 files to DVD using the Nero codec.

Actually even the OEM Version of Nero7 includes this Bill, well here in Australia at any rate
You can check this in Tools -> Options -> Compatibility

As I said, always fun...

[ss-kalm]

I'm probably out in left field here, but what are you going to play these movies on ......... ?

If it's going to be a standard DVD player and a TV, then it's unlikely that they will play correctly as MP4's. Someone will correct me, but I don't think that standard DVD players have MP4 compatability.

If it's going to be a computer, then they are just data files, and as such can be burnt to a CD and played from there, as most of the newer computers can happily play back MP4's.

I'm not sure that you need to burn to a DVD ..... But, as I said before I'm sure someone will correct me.