Capturing straight to a DVD or CD

[Selina]

It is possible to cature from my digital camcorder directly to a DVD or CD. I only have about 16 gigs of free space on my hard drive and when I try to capture using the sony Pixela program that came with my dvd burner, it stops capturing after just a few moments. I Have windows XP home edition and it is not fat32 it is the other (ntfs or nfts, what ever, not sure of the correct name).

Thank you in advance, for your advice.

[G-man]

Ulead DVD Moviefactory 2 has a "direct to disc" option that works (only to DVD, not VCD) fairly well. I have the same speed processor as you and I was surprised at how nice the end result actually was. But you have to adjust the quality setting ( 8 or 9 out of a possible 15 works for me) to make sure that the processor keeps up with video stream, otherwise it starts buffering to disk.

You can get a 30 day trial from www.ulead.com

[Ricky2K]

Selina:
When I first bought my HP dvd200i it came with Sonic MYDVD and it sucked because everything took forever and it took total control of every aspect of DVD creation. I fought against it like hell.
I hated it but it'll do what you want. I invested in ADOBE Photoshop to make menus and button but the process was too complicated and I moved on.
With the quality I'm getting now I think I'm going to return to it. So I upgraded my 3.5 build version to 3.51 and will keep you informed.
Try it you might like it. And version 4+ is even better (they say) with the ability to do everything SpruceUp and MAESTRO can do. Supposedly.
Judge for yourself. And let us know!
Sonic MyDVD.
http://www.mydvd.com/plus/default.asp

R2K

[dcsos]

I used a program Called NEO-DVD 4.0 that does just that.
It careates a DVD volume on the DVD-R in real time.
Apart from the annoying "do you want a menu, wnat color what size, tha comes up just as you wanna start the capture..it works fine to create a 5.0CBR (constant bit rate ) volume without skipping frames

[Ricky2K]

neoDVD 4.0 seems to do the same thing that MyDVD does and both programs offer moving menus in the 4.0 version. MyDVD came with my DVD writer and will simply burn a program. But when you're trying to edit out the commercials of your favorite program. You need a program that edits. neoDVD doesn't edit really. Which is my problem with MyDVD (though it does allow you to edit it shouldn't take you days to do a 1 or 2 hour program should it?)
I can't see the benefit of neoDVD OVER Sonic's MyDVD. I've got version 3.51 and yes I can get more if I upgrade but how much more?
Here's what CNET says about its 8.0 rating choice of neoDVD.
"We have a few quibbles, such as the wildly inaccurate file-size estimator that told us we were making a 7.2GB DVD from our 3.8GB files. It's best to create an image of your DVD on your hard disk first so that you can verify the size, then use NeoDVD's DVD copying utility to transfer it to a disc. MedioStream also imposes an amazingly restrictive eight-character disc-naming limit. NeoDVD limits disc-menu and filename sizes to 18 characters--a more workable situation but certainly not ideal. "
http://www.cnet.com/software/0-3227896-1205-20241641-1.html?tag=rating
That's not a glowing recommendation and from the tutorial its not as great as the ads make you think.
User comments say that the OUTPUT quality is bad. Hell I've got that now! Until we learn to use a Bitrate Calculator correctly I don't think any of us are going to be happy with our results.
The key just might be in direct from CABLE/ANT recording to DVD with nothing in between. Meaning grab it from HBO or SHOWTIME and get great results or GRAB each segment from CABLE/ANT to DVD+RW and then compile the results to DVD.