Showing home movies on TV

wadewade

I've just come home from holiday. Enjoying my newly-retired new hobby, I took some video on my new Panasonic HDC-SD10 camera.

I tried using Adobe Premier Elements 7.0 to edit it but it didn't seem to work very easily so I used Windows Live Movie Maker which seemed much more straight forward. After editing I clicked to save it and burn it to a DVD.

I noticed it saved my masterpiece as a WMV file.

Having burnt my disc I tried showing it on my bog standard Sony DVD recorder but when I tried to look at the contents it just said "Photo Album" rather than the name of the recording.

So then I tried it on a different computer and it loaded up easily using Windows Media Player, showed me the name of the file I had given it and played perfectly.

I wonder if someone could tell me whether I have to do something else to the disk to make it play on a DVD recorder, please?

scheming_gypsy

sounds like you didn't finalise the DVD but just burnt to it so it can be played on other computers. I can't remember if you can finalise them once burnt but if you burn it again, on the screen where it asks what speed you want to burn at, there's should be a button to show advance or more options. Click that and it'll give you the option to burn so it can be played on computers or to finalise so it can be used on other devices.

(might be slightly out as i'm doing it from memory)

stilltheone

Which Operating System are you using?
You should know that your Camcorder shoots in Full HD 1920x1080 pixels. This is in excess of the DVD Video specification. So you can create a DVD Video disc from your edited content, but the picture size will be reduced to 720x576 pixels(or 704×576 pixels).

You can use DVD Flick to create a DVD Video disc playable in your stand-alone DVD player.

aerostar

You need to check if you DVD recorder CAN play WMV files, to make it DVD player compatible you need to save/set it up as a DVD system, probably not what live movie maker can do (but it may !).

Adobe elements should be able to do the standard DVD format, try loading your wmv into it and then see if it can be make a DVD disc properly.

DVD files have the extension .vob.

wadewade

Thank you all for your useful advice, I'll give your various suggestions a go.

head2head83

You may need to burn a new DVD using specific DVD authoring software, to ensure that it burns to the disc in the right format.

Something like Nero should do the trick. Be sure to select 'Burn DVD Video' or something similar, rather than just using a standard 'burn' option.

There is a difference between just burning files to a DVD, and burning them so that they can play on a standalone DVD player - I think this may be where you are going wrong, as others have suggested.

wadewade

Aerostar: I decided to try your suggestion first of using Adobe Premier to convert the file and it seems to have worked on my first attempt - Thank you.

The conversion process took rather a long time but was worth it. I see Amazon have now got a guide book in stock for this program which I think I might buy (don't think it was out when I originally bought the program), possibly using one program all the way through might speed up the process.

Thanks to the other people who replied. Very useful and I shall keep their suggestions in mind for the future.