Be Excellent To Each Other

A question if i may. For various not at all illegal downloads, i use convert x to DVD. This has worked fine up to recently. The burned DVD's are stuttery as if frames are missing. I got a newer version of the program but it still does the same. I wonder if my computer is not up to it anymore? Any ideas welcome!

How are the originals?
Have you installed any other video stuff recently?

yeah, original AVI's play perfectly. Haven't installed anything/fiddled with settins. I hardly use the desktop PC other than for burning DVD's. i should have said its a consistent frame stutter - not just a porr burn in places.

Sound like a bad drop frame NTSC to PAL conversion going on somewhere. Check your input and output settings. Modern TV's are ok with NTSC so if your "downloads" are from the USA, ensure the output uses 720x576i at 30fps.

Thanks, yes thats the output its set to. i've tried various disks/AVIs and its doing it on all of them, on different players/the computer too. No issue with the sound though...

Would it be worth you picking up something like this that can play the avi's direct?

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Toshiba-SD2010- ... B003DA63A0

Nope, nice idea, but usually its for old films for my dad (shame on you people who thought it was porn!). He hasn't graduated to the world of having internet or a computer as yet!

That's a DVD player! But it can play data, too.

Yeah, sorry, i realised that, my general meaning was he's crap with technology!

I like Grim...'s suggestion and something like that would remove the conversion problem and a lot of the other slow parts of your system - I look back to how I used to do this :

At the start we downloaded stuff and could only watch it on the computer
Later we downloaded it as other weird formats and then burned it onto DVD's
Later we burned it onto DVD-RW so we could re-use the disks
Later we put it onto USB sticks which connected to a box under the TV
Later we put it onto USB sticks which plugged into the TV
Later we connected the TV to the network and connected to a box which handled streaming the files
The TV now is connected and can stream them from any network source (that it can read)

I think your at step 2 above and following Grim...'s advise you'll get to step 4

I know its unlikely but also worth checking that the TV doesnt have USB connectors (a lot of them do - even the cheepo ones)

It's so I can give my Dad disks to watch, i don't have a problem or particularly want to burn discs for myself. He's got a perfectly good DVD player (and as its one of those combo VHS ones that older people seem to love) i can't imagine he'll change it or his massive CRT TV.

Thanks for the help and the potted history of vour viewing habits - I just really wanted to know why its not burning correctly, but i feel honored to have participated in the age old BEEX game of recommending something entirely different when a question is asked.

To be fair you started it by giving a question but missing out on a some key information :-)

Given what you've said my other suggestions would be :

Try it in an alternative DVD player in case its his player thats on the way out

Re-burn something you have done before that worked (to check and see that its the machine / burner and not the files your downloading - if it plays okay then we need to know what file type it was / what file types are failing / etc)

Burn it on a different machine (use a friends?) to see if its something on the machine or the burner itself (if this works fine then the problem is with the machine your using - if it fails then the software is a problem or the DVD player)

Re-image your machine back to defaults (in case its a software problem - lengthy but its possible that for example a recent windows update has changed just enough on the machine to stop it working the same)

Get an external drive and try burning it on the same machine in case its the burner just on the way out (dvd drives fail - it could be the drive thats faulty - it could also be the disks - have you tried 'fresh' ones from an alternative pack?)

Finally i'll go back and say that Grim...'s idea is still probably the best one - its a very low investment (£20) , and a lot of these machines will simply come up with a menu if you put in a DVD with various AVI files for you to select - so you burn 4 or 5 movies to a single disk and he can watch them by just having one 'other' box plugged in (if its his DVD / Video combo thats on the way out he's going to need to change machines anyway)