Okay, I apologise before hand if this question has already been asked or not, but I'm getting frustrated searching and trying programs that will supposedly work and end up wasting my hard drive space.
My wife and I are expecting our first child and with family all over the US I'm trying to get creative on how to send out pictures and videos. I thought about going the online route but some family members are still on 28.8 modems! I'm also trying to do something different and send a CD media.
I've got a target audience that has either a DVD player, a PC or a Macintosh. I have Nero and Prassi CD Burning software and an Acer 20x10x40 burner. I'm going to be getting a TV capture card soon.
I want to be able to take VHS-C tapes from my camcorder, save them on my hard drive and burn them onto a CD that my family members can then put into either their computer or DVD player and watch. I'd like to have the things work either on auto-run or with simple directions.
If it takes me making different discs for different mediums that's fine. I do know that I've burned 4 CD's and tossed 'em. I can't keep going on flying blind. Does anyone have any suggestions or guidance?
Hm, I would suggest that you use MPEG-1 format -- virtually all the computers ship with MPEG-1 player (QuickTime for Mac, Media Player for Win, etc). If your friends don't really know a **it about technology (normally the case..), just encode your video to MPEG-1 with TMPGEnc -- quality is slightly better than new bought VHS tape has and it is very universal format unlike MPEG-4 / MPEG-2 / DivX / etc..
Also, if you want to experiment, you can encode the video to VideoCD-compatible MPEG-1, using TMPGEnc again, which allows you -- if you want -- to burn the movies as VideoCDs. Problem with VCDs is the fact that not all DVD players play those (99% do, but I would put my money on the fact that if you send VCDs to total non-techies, 2 out of 3 of their DVD players don't work for some reason :-) and then you need to guide them through the process of solving the issue, etc.. So it's easier to send out CDs with MPEG-1 clips.
