Hullo,

Faye has a student who needs to burn their AVI file to a DVD and play it in a DVD player. How might one go about that?
They have FCP 5.1 available to them, plus iLife. The Macs are fairly locked down so anything that needs them to enter an admin password to install software is a no no.

Any help would be greatly appreciated

Ben

AVI is a bit of a strange format - well, it's more of a container for other codecs. As such, some AVIs will play on a Mac and others might not - sometimes you get video and no sound, or vice versa.

Can she confirm if the movie file plays OK in QuickTime Player on the Mac? If so, then just use iDVD to create a DVD of it. If you don't want any DVD menus, which iDVD will, by default, try to force you into choosing a theme, then you can use this method...

1. Launch iDVD.
2. At the opening screen, there are four options (Create a new Project, Open an existing project, Magic iDVD and OneStep DVD). You don't want any of these!
3. Instead, go under the File menu and select "OneStep DVD from movie"
4. Select the video file and click OK
5. Insert blank DVD-R when prompted and leave it to encode and burn it. You should have an auto-running DVD with no menus.

If, however, the video doesn't play in QuickTime Player then you might need to convert it to something more compatible with QuickTime (MP4, MOV etc). AVI is possibly the worst format in the history of video formats!

You could also try Roxio Toast if they have it - sometimes works with more codecs than QuickTime.

The file does play in QT. We've battled with DVD Studio Pro with no avail...We'll have a go at iDVD. Thanks for your simple steps Steve

Steve, you're a genius! Thank you so much for your help, the DVD is burnt and the student is happy

Great to hear it worked.