By default, Windows XP has Windows Movie Maker installed for creating and editing home videos. It’s quite easy to use and gets the jobs done if you’re looking for a quick way to turn your digital videos into something a little more professional. You can import videos from your digital camera into Windows Movie Maker and you can automatically import your video directly from a camcorder also!
However, there is no option in Windows Movie Maker to burn your finished movie (WMV) to a DVD. It only lets you burn it to a CD! Now that’s just plain wrong. So in order to burn the WMV file to a DVD, you have to use a couple of free third party programs to get the job done.
Burn WMV to DVD
Firstly, your computer will need to have a DVD burner, otherwise this is not going to work! After that, you’ll need to be running Windows XP with SP2 as that contains Windows Movie Maker.
The two programs we will be needing to help us get our movie onto DVD are DVD Flick
and ImgBurn. DVD Flick is a very cool open source program that you can use to convert just about any video on your computer into the DVD folder structure and format. Once converted, you will use ImgBurn to burn the newly created DVD folder to your DVD.
Step 1: Save edited movie from Windows Movie Maker
The first thing that you need to do is to create your movie in Windows Movie Maker. I am not going to go into how to use Windows Movie Maker in this post (maybe a future one), but if you just click around and read the menu items on the left, it won’t be hard to add titles, add transitions and add video effects.
After you have completed the movie, click on Save to my computer under the Finish Movie section.
This will export your modified movie to a Windows Movie Maker file, which will end in .WMV.
Step 2: Convert WMV to DVD format using DVD Flick
Now that we have our Windows Movie Maker video saved to the hard drive, we need to convert it to DVD format. That’s where DVD Flick comes in! Open the program and click on the Add Title button at the top right.
Not really sure why it’s called Add Title since it’s really video clips you are adding. If you made the full video in WMM, then you would simply browse to that video and select it. If you have multiple videos created via WMM or any other video you want to add to the DVD, just keep clicking Add title.
Note the left side bar will show you the percentage of the DVD that is full, so it’s really easy to figure out if you added too much video or not.
Once you have added all of your clip(s), go ahead and choose a destination folder for the converted DVD at the very bottom. By default, this folder will be completely erased every time you create a new DVD from DVD Flick. Note that it can take up to 4.7GB of space, so you to choose a drive that has lots of free space.
Next click on the Create DVD button at the very top menu. It’ll ask you if you want to proceed and that the data in that directory will be deleted.
Now just sit back and wait as it converts the videos into the DVD format. This can take up a good amount of time depending on how fast your computer is and how big the videos are. For a full DVD on my computer, it took almost 2 hours, so yours will vary
Step 3: Burn files to DVD using ImgBurn
After the movie is converted, you can then use the free burning program ImgBurn to burn the files to DVD. Note that this is not a DATA DVD, it will be a video DVD that you can play in your regular DVD player like any other DVD movie, etc.
Start up ImgBurn and then click on the Write Files/Folders to Disc option.
Now click on the Browse for a folder icon in the menu at the top right.
Now browse to the folder on your hard drive where the files were exported from DVD Flick and select the dvd folder inside the main folder. Basically select the folder that is called dvd and that is the direct parent of both the AUDIO_TS and VIDEO_TS folders.
Insert a blank DVD and then click on the Build It button at the bottom left. It’s the one with the folder and the green icon pointing to the DVD.
That’s it! Once the DVD has completed being burned, you can pop it into your DVD player and you should now have your Windows Movie Maker video playing on your TV!
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