Sonic MyDvd crashes, trying to burn my .tivo files

[sigpop]

first crash is when i simply dropped a couple files in it to make a menu. restarted in and second crash happened when i clicked on one of the clips to edit.

is the program garbage or think my system is goofed? i have a pretty new install, dell 8400, winxp pro, plenty of ram and hd space if that matters.

[lordsmurf]

Well, MyDVD is garbage.
But then again, .tivo files are inappropriate source.

[sigpop]

agreed, but right now i have no alternative. once i replace my hard drives in my old computer, i'll dump my leadtek tv tuner in to record some shows for the kids.

[Eyedoctor2]

You might try an alternate method to mydvd.

Almost everything you need to know can be found at:

http://www.zatznotfunny.com/ttg.htm

Most important part of that is the following excerpt:

UPDATE, 6/14 The author of EtiVo has released DirectShow Dump, http://prish.com/etivo/tbr.htm, a free utility to extract the content of .tivo files as unprotected MPEGs. Depending on the recording quality (file size) and your computer specs, conversion only takes a few minutes.

Steps then are:

1) Put .tivo file in folder
2) Point DirectShow Dump to that folder.
3) DirectShow Dump will provide you with a .mpg file as output.
4) Use DVD Patcher, https://www.videohelp.com/tools?tool=DVDPatcher, to patch the First Header only, changing the horizontal resolution to 720.

This is necessary because many DVD Authoring programs (eg. TMPG DVD Author) won't accept the 480 x 480 format of the Tivo generated mpgs.

5) Author the resulting mpg with your DVD Authoring software of choice.
6) Repatch the first header of the first VOB back to horizontal resolution of 480 to eliminate playback problems.
7) Burn

Most important advantages of this approach is that no graphedit experience is necessary and no time intensive re-encoding is needed.

Entire process can be completed in much less than an hour for the typical 2 hour tivo show.

Hope this helps!!

[sigpop]

thx, eyedoc. this seemed to work:

-i used the dump utility from Etivo to convert to .mpeg

-i have the 30 day trial for ulead video studio 9 installed and dumped four cartoons to a dvd-rw

-unfort my jvc xv s300 dvd player doesn't recognize dvd-rw, but is starting to fail anyhow, so now i am looking at alternatives there. i was actually looking at a vhs/dvd burner combo for about $300 at worstbuy. it played all the dvd r/rw formats. i'll troll the hardware reviews here before buying, though.

fwiw, i didn't have to use dvd patch to chg the horiz resolution to 720. apparently the ulead program read them. the menu functionality on ulead was pretty limited, but i wasn't too picky for my purposes. i think i have an older dvd auth program laying around so i could get it for the $50 upgrade price.

[sigpop]

update:

i didn't notice before, but the sound is slightly shifted in the direct dump mpg outputs.

then ulead skewed the sound even more.

so i'm still trying to find an acceptable soln.