Help Pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeze

[darenc1965]

Hi Everyone new to this forum and need a little help off of you guys?

I am having trouble playing downloaded movies on my home DVD!

When i download a movie then transfer it to a DVD it says on my DVD player not recognised or no DVD! Is there a software that i need to convert or am i just as stupid as i sound?

Help

Dazzler

[kluelos]

Please do not post the same question in multiple forums, or in an inappropriate forum. It will not get you answers any faster. Once is enough.

Think about how long DVD's have been around. A very long time, no?

In technology years, DVD's are dinosaurs. Ancient relics, long outdated.

The format that video DVD's use is more than twenty years old, and incredibly inefficient compared to modern methods of encoding. Nobody uses it anymore unless they are specifically aiming for VDVD format.

A typical VDVD can fit one feature movie on a single disk. Modern encoding fits four or five on that same disk, in the same amount of space. If you buy an old television series on DVD, it comes in multiple disks with three, maybe four episodes to a disk, where we can now fit half a season on one disk.

So yes, you would have to downconvert to that old format. The first thing it would do is bloat up in size. This would not be because of improved quality -- if anything it would be slightly worse. You can't ever recover quality once lost or gain quality in a transcode. The increased size is sheer fat. The second thing is that it would take time. It's a computationally-intensive job and you couldn't use your computer for much else while it was going on. Depends on how fast and powerful your system is.

Most of what you will download from the net will have a video stream encoded with DivX or its FOSS counterpart, XVid. The file will say so, or there are tools that will tell you so. Most DVD players can't handle these.

Now rather than convert these down to MPEG-2, it would be a lot better if you had a DVD player that could read DivX. These exist. Alas, they're becoming less common, not more, but they are still out there. Expect to pay around US$80 for one and to have to hunt a little.

More and more of what you can download is encoded with .x264 and there are, afaik, no dvd players made that can handle this, so you'll have to avoid them. It's usually possible to find an XVid or DivX encoding of most anything, because even some computers have trouble playing .x264, as it puts a very heavy load on the processor.

You can also try to only download whole VDVD disks. They still exist. They're almost always about 4 GB in size. Look at a DVD using Windows Explorer. Notice that they all have the same structure, a top-level folder named VIDEO_TS containing a bunch of files with very similar names that don't vary much from disk to disk. Notice also that you can't tell what's on the disk based just on the filename. All DVD's have to have that structure. If you make sure your download has that structure, then it's a VDVD and you can burn it directly to a disk. Then your DVD player should be able to handle it. To increase the odds, use DVD-R disks, as they are closest to VDVD's.

It doesn't take very much of this before you realize that you are better off with a computer instead of a DVD player, if you possibly can substitute. If something does go wrong, the player's messages will be absolutely no help. "Check disk", it will tell you. Check it for what? With a computer you will at least get error messages you might be able to do something about, and you can get software that will play most things. So just get a small, cheap computer and the wherewhithal to hook that to your TV instead.

[The UnUsual Suspect]

You might want to consider getting a settop media player too. MvixUSA makes a very good one that connects to ethernet or wifi and an accept an internal (optional) harddrive. It will play any kind of popular video and will even stream it across your network and connects to any standard or high definition tv. I think it cost about $200.

Western digital makes a less expensive unit called Live TV that will play any type of video at about half the cost.

These are your best options if you want to play high definition x264 video. If you want to play xvid/divx video, then a divx compatible dvd player is your best bet. I've seen refurbished models on amazon.com for about $30 usd, and new units starting at $50. Philips makes quite a few of them that are very cheap and work well.

[foxalot]

A Program AVS converter works well.

[Dark_Shroud]

Just a follow up note, right now the Western Digital Live TV Hub is probably the best box they make with a built in 1TB hard drive. Currently the only noteable streaming service its missing is Amazon VOD.