How to Burn .AVI Files to Play In DVD Players
I will start off first with a warning: You will need to use Windows XP or Vista that you can install on your Mac using an emulator application in order for this tutorial to work. You will also need to purchase Convert X to DVD for Windows ($50 US).
Sometimes some software is just better on Windows because there isn’t a good alternative for Mac…yet. This is the case in this situation. There may be a better way that I have not found yet. If you know what that is leave a comment and I will update this page to show the best and cheapest way to burn .avi files to DVD.
So you have learned how to watch tv shows on your mac computer for free but you are looking for a way to burn those .avi files to dvd so that they can play in standalone dvd player. You would think Mac would be all over this, but after countless hours of searching for a solution to this problem I must say that I have needed to use Windows and Convert X to DVD. This is by far the easiest way to accomplish burning .avi files to dvd that results in top quality playback.
If you are burning these files so that you can watch them in your own home on your HDTV, I would recommend you learn how to hook your mac up to an HDTV in order to save some money and wasted DVD’s. For the cost of one batch of blank DVD’s you can watch anything from your computer on your television.
I have tried using Toast and I have tried using many other video file conversion software but I have not yet figured out how to this on the Mac side of things. I will continue to search for a way and then post an update once I have. In the meantime we need to solve your problem of making dvd’s out of .avi files.
How to Make a DVD from an .avi File
You will first need to run Windows on your Mac. There are several different types of software to do this. Some are free and some are not. I personally use Parallels (not free) but there is also Boot Camp (free), VMWare Fusion (not free), and Q (free). These programs only work for Intel Macs.
Once you have one of these emulators installed you must then install a copy of Windows using this software. I have found you need Windows XP to have a minimum of 15gb of disk space to burn the dvd’s properly. (You can see how the cost is adding up but you may have an old copy of Windows lying around from your pre-Mac era of computing).
Now that you have Windows set up and running on your Mac you will need to install Convert X to DVD which is a Windows program. Install it and launch it.
Now drag the .avi files you want to burn into your Windows so that it gets copied into your Windows Operating System. Once that is done all you have to do is drag those files yet again into the white area of Convert X to DVD.
There are other options to use in Convert X to DVD in terms of adding subtitle channels (if your .avi file came with subtitles which is a separate file with an .srt file extension), or adding menu titles and the number of items to be displayed on the menu. Once this is done press convert and insert your recordable dvd into your disk drive. Wait a few hours and you will have a perfect version of the .avi file you downloaded ready to bring over to your buddy’s house to watch or to give to someone as a gift.
Once that is done you can close Windows and pretend like the whole thing never happened. Now go have a shower.
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Tagged With Burning, Movies, Television, Windows
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5 Responses to “How to Burn .AVI Files to Play In DVD Players”
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[...] the past the method would be to burn avi files to a recordable dvd. Not only does this process take forever, it also doesn’t work that well if you don’t [...]
Thanks for your note on hooking up a Mac to a HDTV. On burning .avi files, there is a program called “Burn” available at http://www.opensourcemac.org. You just load your .avi file into the application, choose “video”, give it a title, and it asks you if you want to convert to .mpg. After conversion, you can then burn to a DVD-R disk. No need for Windows and the Mac software is free. The only cost is the DVD-R. Cheers!
Thanks for the comment. I love to use “Burn”. It has all the same functionality as “Toast” for my purposes. What I have found when trying to burn .avi to dvd with “Burn” is that the video and audio don’t match up. I’m not sure why that happens but it drives me nuts and I haven’t wanted to waist more blank DVD-R’s to experiment and figure out why.
I’m not sure if anyone has any suggestions. Thanks for the comment Peter.
On using “Burn”, have you made sure that you have selected the correct video out format on the upper rhs of the screen? There are 4 choices, the default is VDC. If this is used, you will get audio-video sync problems (I had this problem when I first used “Burn”). Try DVD-video (the third selection) on the menu. Hope this might work for you.
This way of burning AVI to dvd on a mac is a bit like flying London to Paris via Vladivostok. Sure, you’ll get there, but there are easier ways.
ffmpegx (shareware, free to use) will happily transcode virtually and video file to DVD and even author the DVD for you.
Burn (free) will burn the authored dvd for you.
Easy!