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Marquis writes, "I downloaded a file from a torrent and it has 5 files in it VIDEO_TS\VIDEO_TS.BUP; VIDEO_TS\VIDEO_TS.IFO; VIDEO_TS\VTS_01_0.VUP; VIDEO_TS\VTS_01_0.IFO; VIDEO_TS\VTS_01_1.VOB May i know what are this files and what kind of format is this?"

It sounds like the torrent you downloaded is a pre-built DVD of some kind. The directory structure for DVD movies typically puts all the movie content and menus in a VIDEO_TS folder. The VTS_01_1.VOB is an MPEG-2 file, which means you could play it on your computer assuming you have DVD player software installed (something like PowerDVD Ultra or VLCPlayer).

The torrent was likely packaged with the intent that you would burn the files to DVD to watch on a set top DVD player. Here's an easy way to burn it for set top DVD playback.

Richie asks, "How do I convert RealPlayer files to whatever so I can put them on a disc to view on my DVD player?"

There are several ways to go from RealMedia files like RM and RMVB to DVD. The way to get the best looking DVDs is to first convert the RMVB files to AVI and then use a DVD authoring software tool like Nero Vision or MyDVD to add the AVI file to a disk. If you have Windows Vista, you can also use the DVD Maker app included in Vista Home Premium and Vista Ultimate. The MPEG-2 encoders in any of those tools are better than what you might find in free DVD authoring software. If you're simply looking for a fast solution for converting RMVB to a DVD playable on your set top DVD player, there are faster methods using a free DVD converter.

Download SoThink Movie DVD Maker

Free DVD authoring software is hard to come by. Many of the free apps I've found are buggy. SoThink Movie DVD Maker is among the best of the free solutions available for DVD authoring. The app converts most formats, including AVI, MPEG, WMV, MP4, RMVB, MOV, and 3GP to DVD. Basic video editing features like trimming clips and combining smaller clips into a larger movie are also supported. When your video is ready for DVD you can burn straight to disk. The default video format is PAL, so if you are authoring home movies created in the US, you'll need to change the defaults for NTSC support. This is especially useful in combination with something like Windows Movie Maker for Windows XP, which includes no DVD burning support. While the app will work with Vista, the Vista DVD Maker application has a better burning engine and far more features for authoring DVDs. [Windows 2k/XP/Vista $0.00]

Chris writes, "We have tried Sonic and Roxio to transfer our digital camera movies to DVD. The movies burn to DVD OK, but when we play in our DVD player on TV screens, the movies are pixilated and not clear... is there some way to correct this problem? If I am understanding the 160 box in the bottom of the camera's movie screen window, our recording pixels may be set at 160 x 120 (compact). Any hope for making to big screen? Or is there a way for the video to only play at 1/4 the size instead of full screen - thereby hopefully keeping integrity of video?

160x120 video is never going to look good on a television screen. The resolution is simply too low. What Sonic does when it authors a standard definition DVD is size the video to fit at a standard full screen NTSC television (or PAL television if you're authoring a PAL disk). That means your 160x120 video is getting stretched to approximately 4 times it's original size. You're on the right track with attempting to play the video at 1/4 the size of full screen, but you need some additional tools to make it work.

The solution to the problem is to add a black border around the video to pad it to an optimal size prior to authoring the DVD. To do this, you'll need two tools I frequently mention here: VirtualDubMod and AVISynth. We're going to use the tools to create black bars all the way around the video to center it on the screen and force the DVD authoring software to maintain the video at it's proper size.

Required Software:

VirtualDubMod
AVIsynth

After installing both applications, follow the directions below specific to your video file format.

Putting Borders Around an AVI

If your source file is an AVI, you can force a border within the VirtualDubMod application directly (or with VirtualDub). Open your AVI file in VirtualDubMod and choose Video > Filters from the menu. Click the Add button and choose the resize filter from the list.

On the filter configuration window, leave the original width and height unchanged. Check the box to Expand frame and letterbox image, setting the new Frame width to 640 and the new Frame height to 480. Click OK when you are finished.

Save the file by choosing File > Save As from the menu. When finished open your favorite DVD authoring app and import the AVI you just created with VirtualDubMod and make a DVD.

Putting Borders Around WMV, Real and other Formats

Other formats, like WMV, ASF, MP4 and Real require AVISynth to add a border around the video. This will help you import those files, add a border, and save an AVI you can use in your DVD authoring software.

Note: If you need to add a border around a MOV file, you need to convert the MOV to AVI before attempting to add a border.

Open notepad and type the following, replacing C:\yourfile.wmv with the path to your video:

For 160x120 video use:
AddBorders(DirectShowSource("C:\yourfile.wmv"), 240, 180, 240, 180)

For 320x240 video use:
AddBorders(DirectShowSource("C:\yourfile.wmv"), 160, 120, 160, 120)

Save your notepad file as yourfilename.avs (where yourfilename is whatever you call the file).

If you need to convert a bunch of files, I included AVISynth templates in the VirtualDubMod download.

Open the .avs file you just created in VirtualDubMod. After you add a border around your video with VirtualDubMod save the file as an AVI. Import the AVI you just created into your DVD authoring software and burn a DVD that respects the original resolution of your video.

Here's a before and after show of the video with border in VirtualDubMod.

For more on using VirtualDubMod and AVISynth with video projects see these other tutorials:

Reversing a video clip to play it backwards
Convert PAL to NTSC with VirtualDubMod
How to Convert RMVB with VirtualDubMod

How to make an HD-DVD using standard 4.7GB DVD media or 8.5GB dual layer disks.

After shooting numerous hours of high definition video footage, I've been itching for a way to create some HD-DVDs. There are no HD-DVD burners on the market at the moment. And media seems to be in scarce supply. Sure, I could shell out $700 for a Blu-ray burner, but then I'd need to spend another $600 for a player that conveniently connects to my television (like a PS3, for instance). At least I can use the Xbox 360 HD-DVD player with Windows Vista or my 360, and there's now an HP HD-DVD player in the wild as well. When I found out Pinnacle added support for HD-DVD burning to Pinnacle Studio Plus, I was thrilled. Better yet, they do it by burning to standard 4.7GB DVDs or to 8.5GB dual layer disks.

The HD-DVD burning feature is a $50 upgrade to the existing Pinnacle Studio Plus package and works well for authoring in either Windows XP or Windows Vista. The first time you go to the Make Movie menu and choose HD DVD from the Disc Type menu, Pinnacle opens a window asking you if you want to activate the feature. You can also add it to an existing copy of Pinnacle Studio Plus directly from Pinnacle's site.

How to Make an HD-DVD with Pinnacle Studio

Once you have the HD-DVD portion of Pinnacle Studio Plus activated, it's relatively easy to make an HD-DVD. Click the Make Movie button and choose the Disc tab. Select HD DVD from the Disk Type drop down and choose a Video Quality. Based on my testing, you want to stick with Best Quality, which gives you 23 minutes of movie time on a 4.7GB disk and 42 minutes on a 8.5GB disk. There is an option to maximize movie on the disk and anther one that dynamically adjusts based on how much footage you have, but if you want your video to look great on disk, stick with Best Quality and edit accordingly.

The Settings page is where you might need to make a few changes. It's here you can set a custom bit rate for your video content, convert the video to progressive scan content as the disk is authored and choose whether to burn to disk directly or create a file on your hard drive and then burn.

The only time you want to use progressive encoding is if your content is already progressive (like if your camera shoots in 720p rather than 1080i).

Based on the test DVDs I burned, I highly recommend choosing the Safe mode for Burn Options. I made several coasters and had to go back and re-render my project, which made the whole process of burning disks take several times longer.

Menus and HD-DVD Authoring in Pinnacle

In my tests of adding menus to HD-DVD projects, the final DVD would not play. In each test, the video launched to the menu screen and selecting a chapter caused the video to error out. This leads me to believe that the menuing in Pinnacle Studio Plus is a standard def only feature. This isn't a show stopper for me, but at some point it would be nice to have a working menu structure for HD-DVDs.

Some tips on HD-DVD Authoring with Pinnacle Studio:

• Pinnacle labels the disk the same name as your video project, so if you want a meaningful disk name, choose your project name accordingly.
• The software does not automatically adjust based on the type of disk you put in the drive. If you're using a dual layer disk, make sure you set the software to dual layer or you'll still only get 23 minutes of recording time when burning the project.
• Don't check the box to re-encode your content. The software will re-encode as necessary and it's almost never better to re-encode your files without reason.
• Know your format and playback options before authoring - in general, HDV cameras record interlaced content. You should master your disk with the interlacing intact under most circumstances.
• If you recorded your video at 59.94, you need to decimate the video to 29.97 with something like VirtualDub or Pinnacle won't recognize the video footage

While this isn't the perfect solution of having an HD-DVD burner and actual HD-DVD blank media, Pinnacle's $50 add-on for HD-DVD authoring is worth the investment. The disks play in the Xbox 360 HD-DVD player both connected to a PC and to an Xbox 360 console. They are also compatible with the Toshiba HD-DVD players. One especially nice feature is support for playback in Vista even without connecting to an HDCP compliant display, which makes for a more compelling story for those of us who don't have HDCP compliant monitors yet. You can acquire both Pinnacle Studio Plus and the HD-DVD add-on direct from Pinnacle.

Sam asks, "How do I convert a PAL DVD made in Europe to NTSC?"

I've experimented with a handful of ways to convert PAL format video to NTSC, with none of them yielding perfect results. If you have a friend in Europe who sends you a DVD created in the PAL format, you might have problems playing it back if you don't either have a DVD player with PAL support or a computer that knows how to playback PAL format content. One way around this is to convert the PAL DVD to either a digital file on your PC or converting the file to an NTSC compatible DVD.

Making a PAL Video File

The easy solution to your problem is to simply convert the PAL DVD to a digital file on your computer. While there are rules about DVD drives supporting multiple regions or both NTSC and PAL, software doesn't care what format a digital file is in, it simply plays the file.

To convert the PAL DVD to a file, you need VLC Player. You can download VLC Player here.

Put the PAL DVD in the DVD drive in your computer (even if your computer is set to playback NTSC DVDs) and open VLC Player. From the File menu choose Open Disc. Click the radio button next to DVD and check the box next to Stream/Save, then click the Settings button.

On the Settings dialog box, check the box next to File, choose a name and location to save your file. Select the button next to MPEG PS, which stands for Program Stream. In the Transcoding options section, check the box next to Audio codec and choose either mp2a or mp3 as the output format. I use 192 kbps as the bitrate for marginally better quality. Last, check the box next to Select all elementary streams.

After clicking OK, click OK on the Disc Open menu to start copying the contents of the disk to a file. Depending on the disk, this will take about 30 minutes to copy the full contents to a file on your hard drive.

If all you need is a digital file, you can either quit here or convert the .mpg file to something that takes up less space, because a full dual-layer disc will create a 7GB or greater file.

Read on for details on converting the PAL format video file to NTSC.

If you want to create a video file that can be burned as an NTSC compatible disk, you need to convert the file you just created with VLC Player. PAL DVD video is typically 720x576 at 25fps. NTSC is generally 29.97fps and 720x480, but in this case we're going to cheat a little in making a file. A commonly supported video format is 24fps at 720x480. Slowing down the 25fps video from the PAL file to 24fps gets you a viewable result without too much complex math. To make this conversion, we need another video app called VirtualDubMod.

You can download VirtualDubMod here.

First VirtualDubMod imports the .mpg file we created, which may take several minutes.

After importing the video, we need to apply a number of filters to the file in order to process the PAL to NTSC conversion correctly.

From the Video menu, make sure Full processing mode is selected.

Choose Filters from the Video menu and click the Add button.

For interlaced content, choose the Deinterlace filter, double click it and choose the Blend fields together option. If your video is progressive content you can skip this filter.

Next add the Levels filter. Because the gamma on PAL content is generally 20% higher than NTSC, put the result of 1 divided by 1.2 in the input level, which is 0.833333.

Finally add the resize filter and set it to 720x480 with the Lanczos3 filter mode.

We're not quite done with the settings yet. Now we need to make changes to the Audio before converting. From the Streams menu, choose Stream list.

Right-click the audio file and verify full processing mode is on. Select Use advanced filtering from the right-click menu, to make sure it is checked. Now select Filters and choose Add. First add the input filter. Next add the stretch filter. Double click the stretch filter to add the stretch ration. To keep the audio in sync with the video, we have to slow it down just a little. The PAL audio is set to match up with a 25fps video speed. We're converting the file to 24fps, so we need the audio to correspond. To get a matching audio, divide 25 by24 and use the result in an audio stretch filter. This translates to 1.0416666. Last add the output filter.

The final thing you need to add to the video processing settings is a frame rate. Choose Video > Frame Rate from the menu, click the button next to Change to and put 24 in the box.

If you plan to convert several PAL files to NTSC, choose Save Processing Settings from the File menu to store all these settings for later.

Now choose Save As from the file menu and either pick a compressed AVI format like DivX from the list of choices or save an uncompressed AVI file. This is the file you will use to make a DVD later.

Read on for a tutorial on creating a DVD.

Erin writes, "How do I get video from my digital camera to play on a DVD. I am using Kodak EasyShare software to burn the videos to a DVD-R. It seems they are burned but I cannot play them unless I click on each mov file in my computer HELP?"

Kodak EasyShare burns movie files to DVD as a data disk. This is great for creating a backup of your movies to store on DVD, but doesn't create a DVD playable in your set top DVD player. To create a DVD for playback in something like a set top DVD player, you need to use DVD authoring software when making the disk.

Before buying any DVD authoring software, you might check the software that came with your DVD burner. Chances are, one of the applications is designed to create movie DVDs playable virtually anywhere.

I use Sonic MyDVD for all my own DVD authoring because it is both simple and flexible. MyDVD handles virtually every video file format, so you won't be stuck converting your movie files before you start creating the DVD. It includes a simple interface for making the on screen menu for navigating DVD contents. MyDVD also offers one of the best interfaces for including chapter points in your DVD movies.

MyDVD may be purchased in one of two sets of features, or as MyDVD Express in the Roxio Easy Media Creator 9 suite. If you think you might ever want to do things like convert video files for iPod playback, edit your movies, make music CDs, or any of the million other options included in Easy Media Creator, buying that package will give you the biggest bang for your buck.

See also: my tutorial on making DVDs with MyDVD.

Keith writes, "How do I make DVD to play on my home DVD player?"

To make a DVD that plays on your home DVD player, you need DVD authoring software to convert the video to the file format for the DVD, as well as add menus and chapters (if you want those features). There are a number of DVD authoring software applications available. My personal favorite for making DVDs is Roxio MyDVD, which is available as both a standalone application as well as part of the Roxio Creator authoring suite. Here's how to make a DVD using Sonic MyDVD.

Download DIKO

With plenty of DivX and XviD video content available for download, there's also a common need for converting those video files to DVD. DIKO is one of the easiest solutions I've found for converting DivX video to DVD. You essentially point DIKO at an AVI and the app sets up the video for authoring. Choose from an authored DVD with no menu, or menus generated from one of two bundled menu generation apps. The app supports approximately 2 hours of video on an SVCD and 10 hours of video on a DVD, although, I recommend against this because the author's idea of good quality and mine are apparently quite different. It installs a few free apps, like AVISynth and VirtualDubMod, providing an efficient polish to these otherwise complex tools, making DIKO a solid solution for turning your digital video collection into DVDs. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]