Newbie question re burning to DVD

[tatters]

Hi all,

Sorry that this is such a completely newbie question, but alas I am a complete newbie when it comes to this stuff.

Okay, thus far I've managed to download season 12 of Top Gear, and whilst it plays perfectly on the pc, I'm having some issues getting it to burn successfully onto a DVD so that I may enjoy it in the comfort of my living room.

So much as I can gather it's something to do with the fact that the files are AVI format? So, a few questions...

Firstly, is it quite easy to accomplish or rather suicidal to try to get all 8 episodes onto the one 4.7GB DVD-R disc? (someone suggested to me to put no more than 1 to 1.5 hours onto a single disc.)

Secondly, should I be converting the files to mpeg-2 or creating ISO files or doing something else before trying to burn it onto the dvd? (another suggestion from the support forum of the new program I got the other day to try to burn these episodes to DVD)

I must say that in the last few days I've learned a lot of new terminology and acronyms, so much so that my head is swimming (should be ready for the next olympics freestyle shortly), thereby I will not be offended should anyone desire to guide me by way of baby steps.

Thank you in advance for your assistance.

[NecroJoe]

Burning top gear to DVD is like making a CD with mp3s. To play a CD of mp3's in a player that's not meant to play mp3s on a data disc (like maybe an older car stereo CD player), you can't just burn the data onto the disc where you'd have, like, 120 songs (100x7mb songs). You have to render it to a CD-Audio disc with like, 15-20 songs.

If you want to fit 4.7gb worth of 700mb episodes on one DVD, your player needs to be able to play the raw files. While many can, most don't. You will have to render a "DVD-Video" disc. By doing this, you can play it in most any DVD player, but you can only fit about 1hr 40 minutes on a single-layer disc before it needs to start compressing the data to fit more on a disc. I will do two episodes, but if I tried to fit another, it looks like ass to me (others will say 3 fits fine).

I will say this: constantly burning DVD's is kind of a pain, because it can take 2-3 hours to render a DVD (on my computer, anyways...basically just as long as it would take to watch them). Plus, you're constantly burning DVDs.

Alternative:
There are quite a few DVD players on the market that can play avi files. My Phillips is a cheap crappy player that I got for $30 at Circuit City like a year ago. If you do this, you could fit a whole season on one or two discs that burn really really quick.

Another alternative: Something like a stand-alone media player...something like the Popcorn Hour or the western Digital media player. Just take a thumbdrive from your computer with the episode you want to watch, copy it over, and then plug the thumbdrive into the player, and play from the drive. Much faster and easier than burning discs.

Yet another: Do you have a laptop with a video out? My TV had a VGA in that I plugged into my laptop's VGA-out. This only carries video, so I also have a cable running from the headphone jack of the laptop to an input on my receiver. It would be even easier if I had a digital-audio-out on my laptop because then I could just have both the audio and video going right into the TV, but it doesn't and the TV only has an optical audio in to go with the VGA in.

[tatters]

Joe,
Thank you for your response, and thank you for laying it out in lay-man's terms. I actually have a bit of an understanding now as to why avi's are such a pain
I do wish to have TG on dvd's that can be played on any player, so I assume my best course of action is going to be to convert them to that mpeg-2 format, then burn them to disc.
Yeah it might be a bit of a pain waiting so long for them to burn to disc (actually it was taking 20+ hours to burn the entire season in avi format so I guess 8 or so hours for another format is not going to be much in comparison) but I'll persevere to get the end result I desire.
Thank you again for your informative help

[NecroJoe]

I was in the same boat. Heck, I was even making DVD covers for the discs...but then...

An 500GB hard drive is, what...$60 now? And a media player you can hook up directly to your TV like the Western Digital is about $100, give or take. I don't know how many seasons you want to back up to DVD, but...your looking at like...60+ DVDs, 3 hours for each disc...there's the cost of the DVDs, and just the pain of doing it. Setting up the burns, leaving the computer on when it didn't need to be...but because I've been burning so many, I feel like I have to keep going *laughs*. And don't think I'm uncommitted. I've done the same for Mystery Science Theater 3000...that show was only 10 seasons, but many of the seasons had 24 episodes. It was 199 discs, because each episode was about 1.5 hours and 2 in a disc looked like ass. THAT was a lot of fucking burning. Add to that, that when I started, I got a lightscribe drive and set up an editable template for every disc...which was another 18 minutes a disc to "print" the label. And now some of them are starting to go bad.

When I build my next computer, though, over the next few months, I'll be re-doing my whole media set-up. not sure if i'll be doing a HTPC, or just a media player, but hard drives are so cheap it just makes so much more sense to just keep the files digital and find a way to play them on the TV, rather than going through all of this just to make [what I had] work.

[tatters]

Joe,

I was going to make my own dvd covers too, but then I found some pretty good covers already done up for the discs at mylifeindoors.blogspot.com which I'm thinking of using. Just bought some DVD cases too, and have a pile of 50 dvd-r's that work out to 50c each, so it's really not that expensive in the grand scheme of things.

My main issue is how long it's taking to download the episodes lol... Once we use our 12GB for the month we're reduced to dial up speeds so it's painstakingly long. As they say though, nothing good comes easy. Thus far, after two weeks, we have all of Season 12 and 2 or 3 of the episodes from Season 13. So it's going to take a LONG time to get the whole lot.... Patience is a virtue or something like that, right?

Being perfectly honest, if TG was available to buy I'd go out tomorrow and get the whole lot. My hubby and I are huge on having real dvd's rather than burnt ones, hence why I'm such a newbie about this stuff lol. But, since TG haven't gotten their act together yet, this is the next best thing. (We already own every single TG dvd that's available, problem is that unless they're a special like the Polar one, they're just bits of shows and quite a bit is left out).

But I get what you mean about the whole leaving the pc on... ours had hardly been turned off in the last fortnight, what between downloading and burning.

Cheers again for your help mate!

[cheffi]

check if your dvd/bd player supports DivX, if it does just burn all files on a regular Data Disc.

If not... bad, you just cannot get a full series onto one dvd (even a 8,5gb dual layer one). Reencoding to be DVD Player capable makes the files horribly big...
But if you want to do this, most sophisticated burn applications like Nero, Toast or similar Freeware stuff do the conversion stuff without bothering you with too many details =)

Hint for the HD-Fans:
Since the upcoming season will be in HD -> the Samsung BD-P1600 BluRay Player is a nice cheap player which supports mkv files, so download -> usb stick -> top gear in hd

[matt2000]

Originally Posted by cheffi

check if your dvd/bd player supports DivX, if it does just burn all files on a regular Data Disc.

If not... bad, you just cannot get a full series onto one dvd (even a 8,5gb dual layer one). Reencoding to be DVD Player capable makes the files horribly big...
But if you want to do this, most sophisticated burn applications like Nero, Toast or similar Freeware stuff do the conversion stuff without bothering you with too many details =)

Hint for the HD-Fans:
Since the upcoming season will be in HD -> the Samsung BD-P1600 BluRay Player is a nice cheap player which supports mkv files, so download -> usb stick -> top gear in hd

It can be done, but the loss in quality will be enormous (unless you use double layer discs)

And regarding HD, I'll just download the 720p videos from BBC iPlayer in h264 and stream them to my Xbox.

[johncartlidge]

My haporthworth as another newbie.

1. We intend getting a media player to plug in to the TV for this purpose, but until then…

2. I used to plug the laptop to the TV with some leads from aldi and that was fine, until I blew the soundcard on the laptop.

3. We have a dvd player that in theory should have played xvid / divx /avi etc but didn’t, until I learned to change the file extension from AVI / DIVX / Xvid or whatever to .mpg

4. Check for codecs if the sound appears to be missing before dumping the file.

Pending media player, the files I get via Final gear I burn onto DVD as data files (not as 'DVD') using “DVDvideosoft” free disc burner and so get around 6 hours per disc, provided the file extension is .mpg and normal resolution etc.

Enjoy.