Please Educate Me on Putting Video on a DVD-R

[dglockster]

I am preparing to make my first attempt ever to put video on blank DVD-R discs.

The discs are Memorex 16X 4.7GB 120 minutes. However, I see nothing on the package that says the discs are formatted.

When I put the DVD-R in the DVD-R/RW drive (D) on my computer nothing appears on the screen. However, the light on the DVD drive does flash a few times but that's it.

When I go to My Computer and double-click on the DVD-R icon, the message "D:\ is not accessible. Incorrect function" pops up. That makes me think the disc has to be formatted.

Presuming the discs have to be formatted, how is that done? I have searched for "formatting discs" but all of the hits that come up talk about things other than formatting.

The computer I will be using is running Win XP Pro.

Thanks in advance for your advice.

[CitizenOfDreams]

CDs and DVDs are quite different from hard drives and floppy disks. Without getting into too many details, I will just tell you what I use when I need to turn a video file into a playable DVD: a small software package called AVStoDVD.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/avstodvd/

[Sgt. Schultz]

The only DVD blanks that you format are those specifically designed to be reused (RW's), they can be used like a floppy disc, flash drive or hard disc. DVD -R and DVD +R allow data to be written to them until the disc is full or it is closed. Your system should recognize the blank DVD and ask how to proceed ... unless that feature has been disabled. You need a 3rd party program to convert/create video DVD's, and that program will burn the data to the disc's.


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[dglockster]

Your system should recognize the blank DVD and ask how to proceed ... unless that feature has been disabled.
My system does not recognize the blank DVD. How do I enable that feature?

I have downloaded AVStoDVD and will see what I can do. Do you think it will work considering that my system does not recognize the blank DVD?

[dglockster]

This morning, I attempted to play a DVD movie using my computer's DVD drive. It launched Windows Media Player and then froze.

Last night, I downloaded and installed AVStoDVD but it would not put the video on a DVD either.

Based on those two experiences, it seems that the problem I am having transferring video a DVD may be the drive itself.

P.S. When the video was transferred from my camera to the computer, it was saved as a "MPEG T-S" file and its extension is "mt2s." Can that be making a difference? If so how can the extension be changed and to what?