mpg on pc to mini-dv camcorder

[daverose808]

hi, please skip down to the last sentence if u dont feel like reading a whole long back story...

i have a very large mpg file of home videos that i made with pinnacle studio 7... i didnt realize that all the original captured clips were going to be so large, so i ran out of hard drive room, and was only able to output the project into an mpg file, and not an avi file, and couldnt send it back to the mini-dv tape. then i erased all of the original clips to make room.

now i have this huge mpg file that i want to continue working on in pinnacle. but pinnacle studio 7 only captures from avi files or from mini-dv. i tried converting the mpg to avi with most of the popular converters listed on this site but the file is just too huge... my next idea was making a dvd of the mpg file using tmpgenc dvd author and then conecting my mini-dv camcorder to the dvd player and recording it that way. but for some reason my camcorder says "write protected" or something like that... even tho it is a homemade movie/dvd... i guess the new dvd players dont let u connect and record to a camcorder.

is there any freeware (with no spyware or adware) program that will allow me to send an mpg file from the pc to my mini-dv camcorder, thru firewire?

[takeshi]

It would take some serious horsepower (or a hardware encoder) to convert from MPG to DV on the fly like this. My guess is that if your computer had the power to do this then it would likely have more than enough hard drive space as well. AFAIK there are not any utilities that will convert on the fly like this. The project needs to be in DV format to transfer back to the camera.

You really shouldn't use MPG as a storage format for a project that you want to work on. It's really only suitable (as a rule of thumb) as a distribution format. I think you're best bet is to get more hard drive space unless you can get the DVD->camera transfer working. Not sure why you're getting the copy protection message as you should be able to do this. How was the camera connected to the DVD player?

[daverose808]

i connected my camcorder to the dvd player using the yellow/red/white ends in the dvd player which connects to my sony mini-dv camcorder at the other end of that cable with one input (audio/video id-2)... i can capture my vhs using that technique, but apparently not with my dvd player?! thank you for helping