I have recently downloaded a movie from limewire on my macintosh and it plays on Quicktime player. Then I created a burn folder and burned the movie onto a DVD and It will only play on my computer but it will not play on my DVD player. Does any know how to make it play on a DVD player.

What did you burn the dvd with?
What speed did you burn the dvd with?

Personally I use Toast 7 Titanium for burning which is reliable for burning & can also convert avi & mpeg files before burning.

It's often a good idea to burn using a dvd-rw disk "if" your burner supports dvd-rw burning.

DVD video disks should be burnt in UDF format. If you burn a disk as a simple data disk, then it might not play on many dvd set-top players.

It looks like you used the finder to burn the dvd. The finder can't burn dvd-video format disks. It burns data disks. If you look inside the disk folder, you'll see it is identical to the original file, right?

I just burnt a disk the way you did it. It's a data disk. It will play on my dvd player "only" because my set top player supports divX video format.

I burned the disc a 4times speed and i used a dvd+r

and yes the i used finder to burn the dvd and it is the same as the original file
I had the quicktime icon on my desttop and i dragged into a burn folder.


what do you mean by your dvd player supports divX video format, what is that

DivX is a type of mpeg 4 format except it's copyright by a private company. The newer dvd players on the market can also play divx & wmv disks which are simply data disks with divx or wmv files on them. Mine can play DivX/xVid, mp4, wma, HDCD disks, ... yet mine was very cheap. The electronics store i bought it from has their own players made to their own description ... I get trade price.

Normal DVD-video disks are created from Mpeg-2 format video. To see what the contents of a normal dvd look like, see Burning dvd video (click on link)

Roxio Toast & iDVD can burn mpeg-2 video dvd's (the same as the ones you buy.)

So you have to convert the video to mpeg-2 or it has to be downloaded in that format?

And do you use iDVD to burn your dvds

I use Toast 7 Titanium from Roxio.
If you were to use iDVD, I guess you'd need to use iMovie to convert the video files before sending to iDVD to burn. I haven't done it this way before. I have opened up the odd file in iMovie however. There are other mac options. But not for free.

You need to downld the video in avi or mpeg. Then let your burner program convert it if it has the abiity. BTW there might be other alternatives for converting. Mpeg Streamclip (free) is a possibility.

But without all the mucking around & testing & trials. Toast is normally the way to go for Mac. See if you can get it. Toast 7 is best!

Thanks for the help I will see what I can get

With Toast 7, you can burn videos to dvd very easily. Toast will convert the videos to the necessary format during the burn process. You can also add menus, edit out parts if prefered such as end credits.

Open Toast, press the Video tab. Then drag & drop the video file onto the main window. Then press the arrow in top left corner to open window-drawer which offers you options & type of disk you want to burn. I'd suggest it's probably best to have the encoding set to automatic (otherwise the video might not fit on the disk if you're not sure.) You can check the options, for audio make sure it's Dolby. For movies, 192 kbps is fine. Perhaps for music-video you'd want higher. By having audio set to dolby & to 192 allows much more space for the video content to be converted at reasonable quality. PCM audio setting uses up much more space than dolby & is not necessary. For video quality, if it's an action type video then you'd want high quality & fast motion estimation set high (around 8 Mbps or less if you use pcm audio which uses 1.6 Mbps.) When you're ready to burn, put a blank disk in & press the red burn button at bottom left corner of Toast. I'd suggest a DVD-RW disk initially if your burner supports it so you can check the results before the final burn. BTW the conversion process may take many hours depending on your cpu speed. You should keep your total bit rate (video & audio combined) below 9 Mbps for safety. Otherwise your player may struggle to play it & skip or freeze at parts. That's why I recommended using the Automatic setting.

You can find extra references to using Toast here: 1. How to keep info of download when burning on a cd, & also this one 2. Compressing file to fit on one 4.7GB DVD-R. For more, use the Forum search button & type in Toast & look for those threads in Mac / OSX sections.

Whilst I said PCM 16 bit audo uses 1.6 Mbps, PCM 24 bit audio will use about 2.4 Mbps. Whereas Dolby uses between about 0.192 to 0.320 Mbps. For audio you get from downlded videos, it's a waste of space using PCM. The quality of such audio will only be dolby anyway. Absolutely nothing to gain using PCM audio & simply a loss of potential video space conversion & bit rate.

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lord how can i read a zip file i downloaded off limewire? When i open the file i cant make out the words. IM running osx 10.5

Can use MacOSX's own unzipper, for OSX 10.5 it's called ArchiveUtility (slightly different name to earlier OSX's.)



Failing that, can download & install StuffIt Expander. If you can't open it with either of those then it's not a true zip file, perhaps a pc windows virus or something.

But not totally sure what you mean "cant make out the words". The zip file or a video inside such as the audio when playing back?