Basic DVD question

CrowdedHouse

Folks I need a bit of advice about DVD copying(nothing illegal I might add !).

I must admit as I dont have a DVD burner on my lappy I know almost nothing about the nuts and bolts of them.

My GF has one of those Sony camcorders that uses the small DVDs and she wants me to make copies of some of them and presumably fit a couple of each on to a normal DVD disc.

My question is what software would I need to do this?

She has a Packard Bell laptop which does have a DVD burner - is there likely to be software bundled on it to do this ?(wont get a look at her pc 'til the w/end and am trying to be forearmed !)

Is there any compatibility issues - the small DVDs play fine on her 'domestic' DVD player.

How many of the small DVDs would fit on a normal disc


Thanks

ARGINITE

So what you want to do is copy the vidoe from the small dvd's on to a bigger one.
If so it should just be a matter of copying it from the small disc on the harddrive of the pc and them when all the vidoes that you want to write are on the harddrive, just write them on to the other dvd. But you wont have a menu system for the new dvd and I dont know how to create one, best thing you can do about that is google.

Tom Dunne

CrowdedHouse wrote:

My GF has one of those Sony camcorders that uses the small DVDs and she wants me to make copies of some of them and presumably fit a couple of each on to a normal DVD disc.

My question is what software would I need to do this?

She has a Packard Bell laptop which does have a DVD burner - is there likely to be software bundled on it to do this ?(wont get a look at her pc 'til the w/end and am trying to be forearmed !)

Assuming the laptop can actually read the min-dvds, the format of the file may be a problem (i.e. it may not be Mpeg2, the standard DVD format). In that case you would have to convert the file someway.

Which brings me to the Packard Bell laptop. 99% of systems that come with burners also come with software to create DVDs, so I would be very surprised if there was no software with it.

Worst case scenario, you can use Microsoft Movie Maker - it comes free with Windows XP, but it is very basic.

wexhun

You will hit some problems with VOB files, try ulead moviefactory which will edit your dvds and perhaps chopperxp to convert to mpeg.

CrowdedHouse

Thanks for the info

CrowdedHouse

Just a follow-up,I couldn't find anything on GF's laptop that would allow me to combine the mini DVD's on a normal one.Movie Maker wouldn't import the video.
(Although reading the manual of the camcorder there should have been software with it to allow me to do this but CD is missing)

Copying across to the HD and back to a DVD would only allow the first folder to be read on a domestic DVD player.

My solution was to download a trial version of Nero 7,this is a very nice program and did what I wanted.