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"Converting Movies?"

I recently got a miniDV camcorder, have been recording random stuff over Christmas and New Year and wanted to send my cousin in America some video of all the family.

Would take quite some time to upload/download all the video's so I was thinking it would be good to put them on a DVD and let her play them in her DVD player.
I know she could play them in her PC using something like windows media player but watching them on tv through the DVD player seems a better way to watch them.

So far I have a few .avi videos and a .wmv video file.

Anyone know how to convert these to files suitable for a bog standard DVD player to play?
How tricky is it?
Would it be possible to put them all on one disk?
Thanks if you can help out

Yeah, used the TMPGend 5 in 1 thing I have to make the DVD, ended up using cucusofts avi to dvd converter which works well and quite quickly too.

Does what I wanted great. Didn't do anything with the .wmvs though.

Thanks for all the help though.

As can TMPGEnc dvd author.

MovieFactory 3 can do that.

Thanks for the replies.

Found my TMPGenc stuff on my old PC earlier so will give it a go converting the movie files and then authoring a DVD with them.

Hopefully will find a way to create a DVD menu to link to each of the various movies I try to put on disk.

:0)

On the subject of movie conversion; I have just been trying out an .avi file converter for symbian/MS OS smart phones that allows a whole movie to fit onto a 128MB SD card, stereo sound scalable quality settings etc...

It also installs a Xvid/DivX on the phone to allow playback.

Ok its not DVD quality (by any stretch of the imagination) - still impressive though. If you flip your phone yopu can choose to watch it in "landscape" mode - looks like widescreen!

Ok, cool, cheers.

You just drag and drop the .mpgs (or .avis, or whatever), tell it to convert, and after a while it spits out a few vobs and an ifo that it burns to disc.

I don't know if it's a vob for each movie file you put on, but its all there, and you'll be able to use skip track to go from one movie file to the next.

So, say if you had 5 MPEG files, it'd make 5 vobs out of them? If so, then would it just catalogue then together and burn them as a disc?

There's a nice program called DVD Santa that will convert any movie file to DVD .vobs etc. and does the burning too. Does it pretty quickly and is simple to use.

The program's not free though.

I'm going to expect that you've got DVD-authoring software to burn MPEG video to an authored disc.

Avi - Avi files generally don't author well unless converted to MPEG first (I've had problems with loss of sound mostly), so use the free programme TMPGENC to convert the AVI to an MPEG file, and then you can import it into your chosen authoring programme for more stable conversion.

Wmv - A format that is very poor in being authored, so again, open up TMPEGENC, and convert the WMV to an MPEG. Do as above from then on in.

Hope I helped, and if you have any other problems, just reply back. Oh, and the authoring software that I use is Ulead MovieFactory 3.