Posted on December 5, 2011
by Alex
I regularly get “How do I do this” questions. A lot of what you see posted on Tech Geek and More, comes as a result of those questions. Tonight’s post is another example of “How do I……”, and this questions revolves around taking videos that are already on a pc and being able to copy the videos to a DVD disc and have that disc recognized on an average DVD player. Tonight’s question comes from a teacher who would like to be able hand dvd’s with study material to his class as part of an overall lesson plan.
These instructions will list the FLV format (which is the file format for flash videos, like what you would find on sites like YouTube). If you have videos in other formats (AVI, WMV, MOV, etc.) these same steps apply, just adjust for your video type in the instructions.
The biggest reason FLV is popular is because of its compression rate, in other words, how small the video can get. The smaller the video, the less bandwidth required to play which is both a cost savings and also allows for the video to play faster. A few DVD players I’ve seen recognize flash files (or other non-DVD formats), but that seems to be rare, so to take the FLV file and play it on most DVD players would require the video to be converted to the format a DVD play would understand. All DVD players read the MPEG 2 format, which is the standard for DVD players.
Since I know we all live on tight budgets these days (computer guys are not immune from not getting paid enough), these instructions use Open Source, as in Free software, to accomplish the goal. So how do we convert the video so that it can be used on DVD – Here are the steps.
Requirements
- Download and install WinFF (From http://winff.org/html_new/downloads.html (http://winff NULL.org/html_new/downloads NULL.html))
- WinFF is available for Windows 95, 98 , ME, NT, XP, VISTA, 7 and Debian, Ubuntu, Redhat based GNU/Linux distributions
*If you are running Windows XP you can download – Windows Movie Maker 2011 (From http://explore.live.com/windows-live-movie-maker (http://explore NULL.live NULL.com/windows-live-movie-maker) )
If you have Windows Vista or Windows 7 – You have Windows DVD Maker already installed by default. (The example shown will be from Windows DVD Maker)
Blank DVD (Could be either DVD-R or DVD-RW)
Pt. 1 – Converting with Winff
1. Start Winff and select the “Add” button.
2. In the window that comes up appears to find your FLV file. When you find it, double-click on it. In the example (below), I’m using a William Shatner comedy bit about Facebook. (If you hold your CTRL key, you can select and convert more than 1 file at a time)
3. Now at the bottom of the main WinFF window, click on the drop-down menu where it says “Convert to” and select “DVD.” Then click on the drop-down menu next to where it says “Preset,” and select the DVD format and location version (NTSC or PAL) you wish to use. If you are in the USA/Canada it will probably be NTSC and in Europe it will be PAL). In addition, most users, will probably want to select Fullscreen for the type of conversion. (You probably will want to play with that one to see what works for you)
4. Next step (at the very bottom), select where you want your converted video to be saved. You do this by selecting the a location on your pc, where it says “Output to Folder”.
5. Last step, click on the “Convert” button and wait for your video to be converted.
That completes the conversion part. There is a 2nd part to get that newly created file onto a DVD itself. Here are those steps……
Getting a .MPG (MPEG) file onto a DVD disk
For some of the more advanced users reading this, you will wonder why I’m using Windows DVD Maker. Well, its simple, if you have Windows Vista or Windows 7, the program is installed. In addition, the most important part, ITS FREE. There are other software packages from companies like Nero and Roxio among others. If you have a DVD creator program, you can use that at this point if you don’t want to use the Windows DVD Maker.
PT. 2 – DVD Burning Instructions
1. Click the Windows “Start” button.-> Under programs look for “Windows DVD Maker” and click on it to open.
2. Click “Add Items” in the program window and browse your computer to the folder with MPEG files.
3. Click on the MPEG file you converted. (If you want to add multiple files then click on each MPEG file while holding the “Ctrl” key to select multiple files) Then click the button “Add.” Selected files will appear in the DVD Maker window.
4. Now click on “Next” and select a desired menu style on the right panel. This is also where you can customize Menu’s and add Slide Shows to your DVD.
5. Now put a DVD-R or DVD-RW on your drive and click “Burn” in the DVD Maker window to start recording the video DVD.
Once the process has completed, you can put the DVD in your DVD player and it should be ready to go.
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