Burning DVDs from TV Shows

[Skyye]

I have a media center pc with a tv tuner card. I record tv shows, and was wondering if I would be able to burn them to DVD. Is there a program out there that can shrink a recorded show down to a more managable size?

Take for instance an hour TV show is 3.38 gigs in size, now that is small enough to put on a DVD, what happens if it is a 2 hour show? Not gonna happen.

If I burn it to DVD, is that even going to play in a player?? Is there perhaps a software that I can get that will make it DVD playable??

I don't want to do anything illegal here, just want to show my co-workers Battlestar and hopefully get them interested. Any help is much appreciated.

 

[radioouman]

You'll need to convert it to an MPG video that fits the standard format for DVD players.
I'm not sure what people are using today for this, but a few years ago TMPEGENC was the one. (Then use TMPEG DVD author to get it into the proper structure to be written to DVD.) Basically, if you have a 30 minute show that is 4 gig, that is too much data for a DVD player. It needs to be compressed.
What format does your TV card capture in?

 

[loup garou]

http://www.fstop-blues.com/2005/04/windows-media-center-tip-burn-dvr-ms.html

 

[Bootprint]

You may want to also check over at The Green Button

 

[Skyye]

Thank you for the replys, and I did check to make sure, and yes like the information says dvr-ms is the format.

 

[Raduque]

If you google up sonicencoders.msi install it and reboot, you can burn dvr-ms formats from inside media center itself. If you purchased a Media Center PC from a big-box OEM like HP or Gateway with a dvdrw, it should already come with it - simply press "Info" on your remote with the show highlighted, and choose "Make CD/DVD". If it can, it will ask you to recompress to fit. You can also download an add-on called "Dcut" and it will let you edit the video file inside MCE itself to cut out commercials and/or recompress to WMV so it takes up less space.

 

[Kelemvor]

Most DVD Authoring software will automatically compress the files and such to make it fit. You could jsut convert it to DivX or something if your DVD player supports that. Lots of them do these days.