Can you tell if the disc is DivX or XVid. Those are the two AVI type disc formats that are highly compressed but still very good quality output?

Do they play on a DVD player that does not have the DivX or XVid capability? What program do you use to play them on your computer? .
.
BoilerPlate: To posters who ask for help -- it is nice to thank the volunteers who try to answer your questions !
Anything I post unless stated with a reference is my personal opinion.

I'm not entirely sure about DivX or XVid, to be honest. I only know the disc containing these movies played on my domestic player without any problems so I'm assuming my DVD player(built-in to the base of a flat-screen LCD wide-screen TV, which only had an analogue tuner, requiring me to use set-top-box to receive digital TV, but that's beside the point) is compatible to those types of discs.
As for the computer, Windows Media Player will handle the files off the discs. The reason I asked is that I have an external hard-drive(one of three) dedicated to movie features and TV content(sit-coms, dramas, documentaries and such-like) It's a 1TB capacity hard-drive, another which is 2TB has all my home movies(and stuff I've edited for friends), and the third is around 350GB and is for general stuff - word and publisher documents, bitmaps and MP3s of my music. I'd like to take those movie features and re-render them to the compressed AVI file type, to free up space on my 1TB external hard-drive. I'm hoping the DV-AVI option in my PD8 will do this job. As I said, the last time I looked at this option, I was using a Windows XP computer running PD7, the AVI option would've rendered the content at several gigabytes rather than the less-tan-1 gigabyte I was looking for, thereby defeating my purpose. If this DV-AVI rendering proves successful, I could then, drop a few titles on one disc for friends of anything I have that they might be interested in, just by using the old drag-&-drop method of copying files to disc - easy-peasey!

Hi Neil.F.1955,
SteveK has raised a very valid point regarding DivX and Xvid. In early builds of PowerDirector (I'm using PDR12) the DivX option was provided with the program - downloaded from DivX and installed, the (free) DivX options became available to render/encode a video into the DivX avi mpeg4 codec. The avi is a carrier for a variety of codecs. If I recall correctly PDR8 is a 32bit program and you may still be able to install the free version of DivX and switch the codec when selecting AVI in produce.

The DV-AVI (developed to capture/render and return footage to a mini-DV camera) is not going to compress video to anywhere near the DivX codec. The windows AVI codec is highly uncompressed and results in a massive file.

Look to:
1. Download and use DivX.
2. QuickTime mpeg4 - will give you the compression you seek - see if the disc will play in your machine.
3. You could always upgrade to PDR12 and have mpeg4 and a wider selection of compression choices - but no DivX.
4. DivX/Xvid are standalone software, so you could always render a project in PDR8 and then use DivX or Xvid.
5. There are a number of free conversion software that you can use so you don't have to use the DivX/Xvid products. With the free convertor programs you can use a multiple choice of codecs.

Word of caution. The problem with using DivX or Xvid is that some of the later codecs are not acceptable to the players and the discs aren't seen. Going the avi route has its hazards and mpeg4 is the better option in my view, you'll still need to check discs and players.

Dafydd

Thanks for the rapid reply Dafydd, but after what you've told me, I think I'll cut my losses and continue with good ol' MPEG2. As an old Australian TV commercial for a brand of insecticide spray once said, "when you're on a good thing, stick to it!" So I'll continue to render(produce) my videos to MPEG2 at DV-SP quality so I can fit 2 hours-plus onto a standard DVD-5(4.7Gb) disc.
Cheers, all!

Are double layer or dual layer DVD available at reasonable cost in your neck of the woods (NSW)?

Don;t you see a major difference between using 'best quality" and DV-SP? .
.
BoilerPlate: To posters who ask for help -- it is nice to thank the volunteers who try to answer your questions !
Anything I post unless stated with a reference is my personal opinion.

Hi, Stevek! Yes, we can buy them for around A$10 or so, maybe more, maybe less. But I've found that even burning regular MPEG2 to these discs in the same way I'd produce a single-layer disc, is problematic. Domestic DVD players won't accept home-burned dual-layer discs, though they'll happily play on any computer. It's for this reason that I generally only use them for storage of MPEG2, MP3 or other types of file. It's no point me spending an hour or more in putting together a DVD of over four hours of content, create a menu, and burn to a DVD-9(dual-layer) disc if it ain't-a gonna play on-a my DVD player!(fake Italian accent there from a fake Italian - no, I'm not Italian!). As for double-layer(if you equate them as double-sided) discs, I've only seen the odd commercially processed movie disc in this format but haven't seen anything for home video burning. The main problem there is label space, or the lack thereof. But if you're referring to double-layer as an alternate term to dual-layer, then what I said earlier applies. It's just a waste of effort to go to all the trouble to make a three- or four-hour video compilation if you can't play it on anything else but a computer. To answer your other question(briefly), yes, I do see a difference, a detrimental one. A) the capacity of the disc is reduced to one hour, and B) the discs tend to freeze during playback on a DVD player. Picture quality-wise, there's no discernible difference, but if you render a video in HQ and burn in HQ, you get the freezing effect, if you render in HQ but burn to disc in SP, you regain the disc capacity but still get the freezing effect. It's always best to render the video and burn in DVD-SP. There's NO real advantage in HQ, there are only disadvantages!

Cheers for now!
Neil.

OOPS double layer or dual layer ! Sho9ws how old I am !

How about thumb drives. Here in the US, they are getting very inexpensive for moderately large ones. Does your TV or DVD player have the ability to play from a thumb drive? .
.
BoilerPlate: To posters who ask for help -- it is nice to thank the volunteers who try to answer your questions !
Anything I post unless stated with a reference is my personal opinion.

Hi, Stevek! Thumb drives? We usually refer to them here as "flash" drives but I can see how you'd call them, as you do, because they (almost) resemble a thumb. The answer to your query is: No! The TV, though it is an LCD flat-screen set, has no USB port, the DVD player built into the base, likewise has no USB port. However, I can play back from such a flash drive into the TV by way of a set-top-box which has a PVR function. I can play MPEG2 but I'm not sure, until I've tried it, whether I can play AVI files through the PVR.
Something interesting I've learned recently, and I've only been able to do this with Windows 7(couldn't do it with Windows XP), and that is: successfully play back on my computer via Windows Media Player, what I've recorded on my PVR. Trying this on XP got nothing but hash-noise and no image(ugh!), plus I've been able to copy the file to my hard-drive then edit it in Power Director 8. Mind you, these is a catch(isn't there always?), It only works with "standard-definition" signals. Our ABC, a non-commercial "national" network, has a news channel called ABC24, which broadcasts on digital(Australian) ch.24, but in "High Definition" I recorded an edition of the "Insiders" political chat show from ABC24, got no audio and hurried through the video, plus recorded in three files, but totally unusable for a computer. Won't be trying that again any time soon!
Cheers for now!
Neil.