Good Evening,
I finally have some time at the end of the day to come here sorry it's always so late. that being said here's tonights crisis lol See, a few months ago I'd reccived a couple of discs of old Mystery Science Theater Episodes from a Forum on Yahoo that was for fans of old Classic TV Shows.Anyhoo,the group is gone but I did get these MST3k Eps on Two Discs,Lemmie give ya' the Details The Discs are Staples Media they also say on them "2 hours video"
4.7GB DATA
DVD-R
up to 8x compatible

Now that's printed on the actual surface of each disc,So I figure No problem But when I tried them in my Magnavox Player (cheapie) or my better Sony in the livingroom, I got "Disc Error" on both! Granted I don't know much about the different kinds of Formats but I'll tell you what I can and hope you can tell me what I have to do to make these Viewable on a stand alone player So... I CAN put these discs on my PC and open them on Windows Player but none of the "Shrink" or "Dvdfab" programs will open it. So I guess I'm not Giving you guys what you need to know in order to help me I'm just hoping one of you will be reading this and based ONLY on this little Sliver of info ,you,ll be able to say "Oh Sure Nitwit,Just Do X,Y and right Click on A" I know it's asking alot folks but I would really like to watch these shows on regular TV rather than our Moniter. And Again I could NEVER express what a help you've all been so far!
John
If you need anymore info to go on I'll try to find out just ask "Help Us CDFreaks You're Our Only Hope." lol

Do the disks play in the computer? In other words, do they play in Widows Media Player, or VLC or PowerDVD if you have them?

Can you look in My Computer and see the name of the disk there in the drive? Can you right click it and Explore and see the files contained within? If so, do the disks contain a Video_TS folder and an Audio_TS folder?

If the files are not encrypted, and it doesn't sound like they are, you should be able to right click on the Video_TS folder, copy then paste the folder onto the hard drive somewhere.

When you put these discs in the computer, can you open the disc to view the folders?

EDIT: what Kerry said.

Hi ya' Kerry, Yes they Play on the Windows Player (That's the destination I always use) and there has ben a File I managed to find that showed the different Episodes as little Thumb Nails I can open Windows player Directly and find the Disc listed AND play it. I just CAN'T figure out how to transfer over to a burning/compressing Program That will make these Films Viewable on a DVD Player. Thanks

John

Lets try this again....is there a Video_TS folder?

I gotta Find it . Where do I find Video_TS ?

Put the disk in the drive. Go to My Computer (if you are using Windows XP), find the drive where the disk is, right click on the drive. Now in the options you'll get, hit Explore. You should see a list of Files Currently on Disk. The Video_TS folder and the Audio_TS folder should show up now.

Ok when I did that I got it open it said AVI showed a Thumbnail with a lil' Windows icon in the corner of each. So whats next

Ok, that means your video is not in dvd format. They are avi files, which may or may not play on stand alone dvd players. Depends on the codecs used and the capabilities of your individual player. Yours apparently doesn't like these avi files.

First thing...copy them to the hard drive. Highlight all the files on the disk, right click on them, hit copy, then paste to a folder on the hard drive.

Next, I suggest converting to dvd-video format. Use AVStoDVD or DVDFlick or FAVC to convert. Any of those will produce a finished dvd ready to burn to disk. They will all accept multiple avi files and allow you to build a menu to select which one to play.

Be aware that converting to dvd-video will take a lot of room, so you may only be able to fit 2 or 3 files per disk. That depends on the quality you want to preserve...thinking in terms of time I suggest no more than 2 and half hours per disk.

All of the conversion programs I mentioned are free to download and use. Do the actual burning with your favorite burning program, or you can use a free one called ImgBurn. It is my burning program of choice.

Now, I do have a question. Are each of these files a separate episode? Or do you need to combine them to make an episode? If so, do this before conversion. If you do need to do this, use Virtualdub and the Append function.

no All seperate films four on each 1 hr. 41 minutes on each EP. Thank you so much. Now I must ask, Any Links to AVStoDVD programs?


John

AVStoDVD
http://www.videohelp.com/tools/AVStoDVD

DVDFlick
http://www.dvdflick.net/

FAVC
http://favcfavc.googlepages.com/

Be aware that FAVC requires AviSynth and Net 2.0 or higher. There are links to both at the FAVC site, and both are free.

By the way, all these are easily found via Google.

A Follow Up ...Kerry, I went with AVStoDVD I installed the program but we have family coming from Miami. Anyhoo, I hope to try it sometime this weekend. Thanks again!

John

If these great suggestions don't work for you or are difficult for you to manuever, you can make an ISO image of your originals with Xilisoft AVI To DVD Converter. Then, you can use ImgBurn to make a DVD disk that will play in any DVD Player. You can Google both of these to find them. Good luck!