play back on cd or dvd player

crefloland wrote on 12/5/2008, 8:50 PM

Does photostory on cd & dvd 7 allow you to put both photo's and video on a cd or dvd disk so it will play back on a dvd player? I find the jpeg will play in a slideshow but the video (avi) is not recognized so the video isn't played. I have unlocked the mpeg-2 code. I got this program as I understood it would play both on either a cd or dvd. If it will what's wrong?

Comments

ralftaro wrote on 12/8/2008, 9:14 AM

Hi there,

I'm afraid your enquiry leaves a few open questions. Exactly what kind of format are you authoring in PhotoStory 7 and what device do you expect it to play on? Are you authoring an actual, standard-compliant video DVD or are you authoring some kind of data disc (e.g. slideshow disc with JPEG files on it)? What do you mean by "CD"? A proper video CD? Where do you have problems with those AVI files? Do those already occur during/after importing the files into PhotoStory or later when trying to replay the resulting DVD?

After all these questions, here are also a few facts: Generally, PhotoStory supports the import of various video formats/codecs. AVI is generally supported as an import format, but since AVI is only a container format it also requires that the audio and video codecs used in the AVI file are installed on your system. So, that would be something to look into.

P.S.: If you don't know about the codecs used in your AVI source files, you can use a free codec analyzer program to get more information, e.g. GSpot.

www.headbands.com/gspot/

ralftaro wrote on 12/15/2008, 4:01 AM

Hi again,

Thanks for further clarifying this. Based on your additions, this essentially means that you're not authoring a standard-compliant video DVD. You're just burning some kind of data disc that has your individual image and video clip files on it again. In this case, it's not surprising your DVD player will fail to play the video clips. There are plenty of DVD players out there today that will not just replay standard video DVDs but also read all kinds of video formats from data discs. However, this is not a guaranteed DVD player feature and not even those players can replay all video codecs.

Here is what you need to do: When you're in the "Burn" tab of PhotoStory 7 and you clicked on the burn button to get the disc selection, just choose the main "DVD" option - plain and simple. Ignore the other available options, which are only for very specific use cases or kind of obsolete for most users by now (e.g. Video CD). You will also have to use a DVD-R blank. Only this approach will lead to the encoding and writing of a proper video DVD. Your entire project (both still pictures and any video clips you might have in there), exactly as you can see it in the program's preview mode, will be encoded into MPEG-2 motion video and written to the DVD. A normal DVD player will be able to play this.

By the way, you can also verify that the right format was created after burning a disc. Just put it back into your computer and look at the contents of the disc in your Windows file browser. On a video DVD, you need to be able to find a directory called "VIDEO_TS", which holds the actual movie/slideshow in big files with the extension "VOB". If that is not on there, it's not a proper video DVD.

I hope this helps.