AVI CDR's on DVD players

  • Thread starter Thread starter TexRoadkill
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TexRoadkill

TexRoadkill

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Has anybody ever gotten an AVI CDR to play on a DVD player? My dvd player is supposed to do it and I tried a few CDs but was never able to get it to work. My boss wants me to figure out to use a portable DVD player for sales presentations and I wanted to see if AVI was a viable option. I could get a DVD burner but we want to do it cheap if possible.

Any suggestions?
 
I could help you with those presentations, you know... You need to convince your boss that an 80" projection presentation sells stuff better!;)
 
Besides... If your using avi's, why not just use a laptop?
 
Because laptops are so '98 :rolleyes:

We just thought it would be cool if he could roll in with the projector and a little portable DVD player all in one bag. It's also a good excuse to buy new toys on the company dime ;)
 
Tex -

check www.vcdhelp.com - they have comparison charts showing which dvd players will play which types of cd-r media.

Although, unless you get one of the Italian dvd players I just heard about that will play Divx-encoded movies, you are going to have to convert to .mpg2 for the dvd player to recognize the video (I'm pretty sure that's the format for vcd's... check the site, they have plenty of tutorials and links to software).

good luck. hope this helps.

- housepig
 
Housepig's right, you've got to convert to mpeg2. Nero, and probably other cd burning apps, have VCD wizards that kinda simplify the matter. It works pretty well though, I've got a few Tool concerts burned to VCD.
 
Thanks guys. I did some searching on the almighty Google and downloaded some stuff. I'm doing a test burn right now.
 
Housepig - thanks for the web link. Looks like a good site.

I've been having similar problems. I now have 2 ATI All-In-Wonder cards, which can display TV on your monitor & record video from tuner or outside sources. But I just recently attempted to make my first Video CDs. Both Nero 5.5. and EZCD Platnium 5 have wizards built in to make Video CD creation easy. EZCD wants the file to be in MPEG-1 format; Nero will accept either MPEG-1 or AVI (it converts the AVI).

My first VCD attempts were a half-hour TV show, which takes up about 1/2 or a CD. I believe the default resolution is 352 x 240 (or something like that). I recorded the same CD with each burning program, and got the same results. The CDs play on both my JVC DVD deck and my tenant's Onyo DVD deck (but annoyingly show less distortion on his) and will play no his laptop DVD drive using WinDVD playback software. However the CDs refuse to play back at all on either of my PCs using ATI's own VCD player program, so I don't know what's up with that.

The overall quality of the display is similar to a poor VCR recording in 6 hour mode - pretty grainy. I have also tried recording in MPEG-2 DVD format. This looks MUCH better, although still not as good as my SVHS tape deck. In this mode an hour of video uses up 3.7 gigs of disk space. I don't have a DVD burner yet, so this isn't really an option.

My only suggestion about playback, either on computer or stand-alone, is make sure it's a new drive. The older ones don't seem to do anything except legit DVDs. Typically any drive that advertises it can play MP3 data CDs can also play Video CDs.
 
still not as good as my SVHS tape deck.
Click to expand...
What are you using to make your mpegs? I haven't done this in a while, but I believe you have some quality options when exporting to mpeg from something like Vegas. Have you tried anything like that?
 
We got an MPEG2 to work on a portable DVD over at BestBuy but it looked like crap. I'll have to mess around with the resolutions to see what is up. I guess that is the problem when you go from 1024 to 480 res.

What I can't figure out is why you can't do higher resolutions on DVD. I would have thought you could at least do SVHS res. I'm a little rusty on my video specs so I can't remember what res that is. I wish they would hurry up and come out with a decent digital video cable standard so we don't have to use analog cables for digital video and lose resolution.
 
Well, television resolution I believe is around 640x480. The new widescreen HDTV stuff I believe is 800x600. So yeah, you should probably convert the presentation to a lower resolution using software instead of relying on the DVD player to do it using simplistic routine in realtime.

Slackmaster 2000
 
Elevate & Tex - The ATI All-In-Wonder is what creates the file. It records from an analog souce - either it's built-in TV tuner or external via S-Video or composite. When you are doing the recording you can choose what format to record in - MPEG-1 (used for Video Cds), MPEG-2 (used for DVDs), AVI, Windows Media, or a propriatary ATI "Video VCR" format.

All the experimenting I've done so far has been from the built-in tuner, being fed by coax cable. I have not yet tried going from VCR tape to Video CD, but I'm looking forward to moving some old porn tapes to VCD :)

The MPEG-2 test that I did (an hour of the Simpsons) was done at the highest resolution possible, which if memory serves me was 720 x 525 (or something like that). For each format (MPEG-2, MPEG-1, etc) there are several different compression and resolution options. Not all are supported by all players, so while a DVD player may play some formats it will not play all of them. These are some of the questions I'm trying to figure out at the present time. But last minute Christmas shopping & other duties may force me to set this aside for awhile.

By the way, I don't know if this deal is still going on, but CompUSA was closing out the Radeon 7500 All-In-Wonder cards for $99. I bought one to replace my older unit, and am now using both. It's a decent 3D card and a very nice multi-media tool.
 
RWhite - You may need to do some stuff like deinterlacing or whatever - beyond my scope with regards to DV. I'd recommend checking out this site: ArsTechnica A/V FAQ. Lots of info there.
 
RWhite -

this might not be the case with your card, but I know that a capture card I had (a Pinnacle DC-10) had the standard "good, better, best" quality slider, and no other encoding options.

But if you were to dig into some of the nooks and crannies of the advanced secret-ninja menus in the program, you could find a page where you could select which codecs you wanted, the resolution and other nice things that make it look much better than the big block buttons on the first page reading "good, better, best"....

so my suggestion is to dig deep - see if there's a not-very-obvious menu or dropdown or something hiding where you can customize your settings a bit more.

good luck. I hope you find something!

- housepig
 
The ATI program has both - it has an "idiot" slider exactly as you describe, and then a "set custom" button that lets you pick the exact video format you want. Obviously, I use the later.
 
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