i cant burn dvs..lol :S

Entree
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Joined: 26 Dec 2007
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yes call me an idiot..i dont care. i got a few movies and they are all .avi and when i burn them they dont play in the dvd player. do they have to be a certain type of file to work? or is my dvd player a piece of shit? im getting pissed :\

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Joined: 20 Nov 2004
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Standalone DVD players were made to play DVD’s (which are MPEG-2). Originally they were not made to play AVI files.
Now, AVI is a container; inside of it you can have video and audio streams encoded in various codecs. One popular video codec that emerged was DivX. It’s often used to convert the 4.7GB DVD into an AVI that can fit onto a CD-R (700 M with negligible loss of quality [and so it’d be more faster to transfer]. In the old days, once people got their 700MB movie from whereever they got it from, they just used a program to reconvert it back to DVD format, and burned it to a DVD-R and DVD+R. Standalone DVD players can play those.
Later on, DivX-certified standalone DVD players appeared. Those cost a little bit more than regular ones, but can play data CD-R’s with AVI files encoded in DivX (and sometimes Xvid too - Xvid and DivX are different flavors of MPEG-4) in addition to regular DVD’s.

So basically you have two options (assuming your original movie is around 700MB and in DivX or Xvid format):
1. Get a DivX-certified standalone DVD player. You can find a list here
2. Get DVD authoring software and a DVD burner (usually the software will be bundled with the burner so you won’t have to buy it separately), and convert the file to DVD format and burn it.
3. In some cases, you could use software to make a VCD or SVCD (those are MPEG-1, and can fit on a CD-R, so you won’t need a DVD burner), as some DVD players can read those.

P.S: In some cases, spanning the (DivX/VCD/SVCD) movie over several CD-R’s can improve quality.