Convert an .wmv file to a playable dvd
 

How would I convert a computer .wmv file to a dvd player file?

Any number of encoding programs could handle this task.
- What software do you currently have for encoding video?
- What budget would you have to add more? Or must it be freeware?

Also, is this a DRM-protected WMV file, or something you found online? A website based movie trailer, for example.

And then is it an HD quality video, or just a standard definition video? Down-conversion and pre-processing will be needed, if this is the case, to get it down to 720x480 DVD-Video compliant video size.

Freeware is always nice :D

It's a clip you can save, I think it says it's "HD quality" so probably an HD version.

Thanks

For a quick-and-dirty DVD, using freeware, there's always AVStoDVD: http://sourceforge.net/projects/avstodvd/
But it has some limitations that I don't much care for. For example, limited menu background and the inability to make menu-less discs. Same for video cropping and aspect ratio options. In fact, there are not many options at all. You just plop a video into the window and hit "go" and hope it works well. Yeah, it's free, but you get what you pay for.

Better software would be ConvertXToDVD: https://secure.avangate.com/affiliat...so-software.fr
Or as runner-up choice, the AVS Video Converter: https://secure.avangate.com/affiliat...ww.avs4you.com
Both of those are in the $50-60 range, and have quite a few adjustable options for menus, quality, etc.

I use ConvertX pretty regular, for certain tasks. In general, for converting video that I downloaded off Youtube or Hulu, and want to watch on an actual TV at my leisure. (Usually a small kitchen TV, given the quality of that source.) The converted video looks good. Maybe not quite as perfect as manually encoding in Procoder or MainConcept, and then authoring a DVD, but this is quicker. It's a nice option for times when it just needs to be a good DVD to watch, and not necessarily a professional production quality output.

You didn't mention Nero...where do you rank it compared to the others?

Nero is one of the worst video encoders ever made. Ahead/Nero should have stuck to burning technologies, and not tried to copy Roxio, who also has a lousy reputation for low quality encoding.

Nero has some limited success with audio encoding, but that's about it. And that's mostly because they've been dabbling in audio conversion since the beginning, seeing how the earliest burning tasks were making audio CDs. If I'm not mistake, my first Nero version was DOS-based, not even part of Windows. That was circa 1995 or thereabouts.

These tools listed above would be in the "B" range.
The "A" range would be reserved for actual video encoders (MainConcept, Procoder, TMPGEnc, etc)
Nero would skip a few ranges, and be located down in the D or F range. Quality is often unacceptable.
School grading here, of course -- A,B,C,D,F

Wow....so Nero should be freeware! :D

How about "My Video Converter"?...It's a little less than the above and I have seen a good review of it.

Well, it's pretty much worthless for video quality, so the price is right! :D

No. It's more of that crappy Chinese spamware genre. Moyea is terrible quality video encoding, from everything I've seen int he past 3 years of testing what they have to offer. Most notably I recall their H.264 and FLV encoding looking as if the video was built with small Lego blocks. It was awful. The free x264 was much better, with any number of free GUIs, with the commercial MainConcept being better yet.

I'm already reluctant to suggest all-in-one's (AIO) because most of them are poorly coded Asian junkware. Many of them simply stole freeware and put a new GUI on top. Only a few apps were really good, such as VSO's ConvertX. I also tried the aforementioned AVS Video Converter, and it's okay. Nothing special, but better than most in the AIO category of video software.

Thanks...

When you "buy" one of these, you can download the program or spend more $$ for a cd and a box, is the extra $10 or so for the cd and box worth it? I assume I can just save the downloaded program to my own disk, So does the cd have anything the download does not have?

There are only two circumstances where I buy disc/boxed versions.

1. Size. The program is too large to quickly download, and would tie up my broadband connection for longer than I would like. Some of those full multi-gigabyte installers, such as Windows, Microsoft Office, certain Linux distributions or Adobe softwares. I'll pay the extra fees to get the discs.

2. Documentation. With a company like Adobe, you also get the print versions of books in many cases. I really hate reading books as PDFs. I want paper that I can add notes too, stick post-it's in to mark important info, etc.

Also...
There's also something to be said for the quality of a pressed disc, versus burned discs. Some of these laptops and desktops I have to work with have really crappy readers built-in, and instead of dragging better external drives around, I can just install from the better CD or DVD.

Most small software, especially low-cost software is not worth buying disc versions. Just download it. If it needs to be shared between systems, then send it via email, flash drives, etc -- discs are unnecessary here.

Another issue is some discs come with autostart/autoloading junk, and this is one way to avoid disc junk -- no disc!

In the end, it really comes down to personal preference.

That's what I thought, but had not tried it yet.
Thanks!