How do I turn a 700 MB .avi file into something my DVD player will play?

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

I tried just burning it as a file into a CD-ROM. The file was stored correctly, but the DVD player said "disk error". It says it supports "Windows Media".

How do I make it into a VCD or DivX?

[seemunkee]

1. Will your DVD player read those?

otherwise you need a DVD burner and DVD authoring tools.
Go here http://www.doom9.org/ lots of good info and guides

[Spider Jerusalem]

2. If you use Nero as your burning software...

you have the option to convert the file to SVCD before burning...and Nero has plugins for converting to most of the other popular formats, too. You also might want to check and see what formats your player supports (some will do VCD/SVCD but not Divx or Xvid).

[DontBlameMe]

3. What burning software are you using?

Nero will create VCD/SVCD's from an avi or mpeg file. You can fit about 1 hour of movies on a regular cd.

If your software can create vcd's, I'd suggest Virtual Dub to split it into 2 files. You probably won't fit the whold thing on 1 cd. Of course, if you have a dvd burner, that won't be a problem.

[NewHampshireDem]

4. Look for the program DVD Shrink

http://www.dvdshrink.org/

Here's a good post that explains the process ...

http://www.g4techtv.com/screensavers/features/46952/Dark_Tip__Free_DVD_Backup.html

Good luck to ya JYC

[DontBlameMe]

10. Just did Matrix Reloaded

Worked like a charm.

[qnr]

5. Generally, "Windows Media" implies it plays WMA files, for music.

I don't know what type of standalone you have, but you can get refurbished players at Overstock.com (so I guess other places too) that play pretty much every format you throw at them.

If it turns out that your player can not play an .avi, then you'll have to convert it to a VCD or SVCD. If you are doing it on your Linux box, and don't want to mess with mencoder or transcode directly (though it isn't really very hard), you might want to try kavi2svcd (requires the KDE libraries), gmencoder or gtranscode.

mplayer: (mencoder)
http://www.mplayerhq.hu

gmencoder:
http://gmencoder.sourceforge.net

transcode:
http://inferno.slug.org/cgi-bin/transcode

gtranscode:
http://fuzzymonkey.org/newfuzzy/software/gtranscode/

kavi2svcd:
http://www.cornelinux.de/linux/kavi2svcd/index-english.html

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

8. I got tovid and all its gazillion dependencies.

Has a very comfortable interactive console script. Converting as we speak.

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

9. Done

But the resulting mpg spanned more than one CD. The script's output says I can do a postprocessing that's not as heavy as the initial encoding, but I couldn't pay too much attention because I had to go to work.

[qnr]

11. Never used tovid, so I don't know what tools it has. You can use

mpgtx to split the mpg to fit on to 2 CDs if you want

terry@timestorm: /home/terry
18:57:19 $ gaze what mpgtx
mpgtx:
A command line toolbox for MPEG audio/video/system. Joining, spliting, etc MPEG files.
terry@timestorm: /home/terry

18:57:29 $ gaze url mpgtx
mpgtx:
http://mpgtx.sourceforge.net/

[NervousRex]

6. Go here...

http://www.videohelp.com/

this will answer all questions about conversion.

[qnr]

7. Actually, it doesn't, I've used it for years, but it's an excellent

resource.