MiniDV to DVD converted movie problem

I have got Samsung D303D MiniDV camcorder. I converted the MiniDV contents into a DVD and wanted to play in a DVD player to watch it in my TV. But the movie keeps pausing (video +audio) every now and then which some time takes even minutes to recover to play itself. The steps that I follow to convert MiniDV to DVD are:

1)Captured the MiniDV content using Windows movie maker, which gets stored in .wmv file in my PC. Using "Power producer gold" software, edited the .wmv file, adding transitions, music titles etc and burnt into Verbatim DVD -R disc using LG external DVD writer["Power producer gold" software is part of the LG writer]. When played in computer, it works fine but in DVD player, it has got the problem mentined above. DVD player is working fine as it is able to play other DVDs. I have tried with different DVD players. Though some of them have shown some improvement wrt recovering from the problem, but problem existed.

2)I tried Nero vision 4 software suit to edit the .wmv file, use the same to burn into DVD but with the LG writer. This did not solve the problem.

3)I tried to capture the original MiniDV content using Nero vision software, which stored it in .avi file in the PC. Then used Nero vision to edit and burn into DVD using LG writer. But the DVD player could not read the disc itself. I even tried TDK DVD -R disc to see whether the peoblem is linked with with Verbatim disc. But DVD player still could not read it (My PC playes it anyway).

4)Using Nero vision, tried to capture into .mp4 file, used Nero to edit, burn. This time DVD player is able to read as in 1) above but original problem is still not solved.

I have got about 20 hours program already captured into PC in .wmv file and can not recapture them as MiniDV is reused to record new programs. Hence can somebody help me to explain what could be the issue, how can I convert these .wmv files into DVD and in future, what is the best way to capture the MiniDV (.wmv/.AVI etc)?

Thanks,
Keshava Moorthy

 

First, don't use Windows Movie Maker. Use an actual capturing program such as Ulead Video Studio. You should be recording as DV AVI and converting to DVD separately. Lots of guides on the "Guides" tab at the top of the page. (It would be great if you still had the .avi files captured from Nero, although I have no idea if it's DV AVI or not.) How to quickly tell? DV AVI is a very lossless codec, meaning it takes a huge amount of room. Every 15 min should take about 3 GB of space on your HDD.

As for your current files stored as wmv, you just have to convert to DVD format (again, guides at the top of the page). After they're converted to MPEG2, then you can use Nero to author the DVD.

 

Thanks for the suggestion. As mentioned in the guide, I used TMPGEnc to convert wmv to mpeg2.But the original problem where video pauses frequently still persists.

I was wondering, whether nero vision itself can not do the convertion to mpeg2 ? If I add the wmv file to nero project, edit it and proceed for burning, it simply does that without any complaint while doing it. Does it not indicate that it is happy with the input file format ?

When I captured (my 3rd point in the first posting I did earlier) the miniDV content to PC in DV-AVI format (using Nero vision), as you said file size was very huge. Then continued to use Nero to edit and burn but it was not getting loaded in the DVD player. Does this mean that Nero itself is not able to convert any format to MPEG2 (but then why did they provided so many other format support for capturing if it an not eventually convert it)?

Do you belive that my external LG DVD writer-GSA 2164D is having any trouble ? But surprising is that the DVD gets played well in the computer but not in the DVD player.

 

I know Nero has an encoder but I've never fully tested it out. I just saw initial quality results were crap so I never used it again. Maybe it can convert wmv to mpeg2? No idea about Nero converting dv-avi to mpeg2. Maybe you don't have the codec installed?

The video pausing is really strange and I have no idea what's causing it. Have you tried playing your DVD off your HD itself? If it plays fine off the HD, then it could be your burner or media.

 

Thanks again. I returned the LG dvd writer and bought a HP writer. It appears now that problems are sorted now. The wmv files are converted to MPEG2 by Nero correctly but it seems LG writer was doing wrong sometime. Anyway, I am happy for now!!

 

Good to hear it worked out.