Hi there,

I have a load of video tapes from an ancient camera. I have connected up my video player to my hard drive recorder and have them all saved on there. I have burnt them all to DVD's (from the hdd recorder). But now my problem is the file format.

If I open the folder to explore (on my pc), the formats contained are:

• .DAT
• .IFO
• .BUP
• .VOB

I can play the dvds from windows media player, and If I try to import them to movie maker, it says I don't have the required codecs. Also, Adobe Premier will not import the files.

What I would like to be able to do is to make my own DVDs with title screens etc, as at the moment, they are all mixed up and some of them contain sections when the hdd recorder was recording the input from the video player, but videos were being changed or rewinded etc etc.

My question is; could anyone point me in the direction of the required "codecs"? And another thing - which of the files actually contain the video and the sound? I remember from some vids I used to have on my computer that sometimes one folder contains audio files, and another contains video files...? My guess is that when I convert them to whatever they need to be converted to, I will have a separate file for each "title" on the DVD's at the moment, and then I can just add and crop the ones I want etc; Is this correct?

Thanks for any advice,
Scott.

 

Any idea which ones you need ?

Try Free Codecs

Or Video Help

 

Cheers for the links. I don't know what format I need them in - or is there one main format?

Once again, cheers for the links, I'll have a butchers now.

Scott.

 

You video and audio is stored in the VOB, you need to convert to a readable format for the other tools like avi, mpeg, wmv, mp4.

ffmpeg will do this for you but it's command line only and can be a bit heavy, do a google for "ffmpeg windows frontend" and you'll get some options.

Movie maker is terrific for what you're looking to do with the movies but I don't think you can do menus for DVD, you'll need a dvd authoring for that, like premiere but that's probably overkill, the products from Sonic Solutions were great but they were bought by Roxio who ruined them. You might be able to track down an older version.