How to burn Windows Movie Maker WMV video to DVD

Posted on June 2, 2008 at 5:28 am

By default, Windows XP has Windows Movie Maker installed for creating and editing home videos. It’s quite easy to use and gets the jobs done if you’re looking for a quick way to turn your digital videos into something a little more professional. You can import videos from your digital camera into Windows Movie Maker and you can automatically import your video directly from a camcorder also!

However, there is no option in Windows Movie Maker to burn your finished movie (WMV) to a DVD. It only lets you burn it to a CD! Now that’s just plain wrong. So in order to burn the WMV file to a DVD, you have to use a couple of free third party programs to get the job done.

Burn WMV to DVD

Firstly, your computer will need to have a DVD burner, otherwise this is not going to work! After that, you’ll need to be running Windows XP with SP2 as that contains Windows Movie Maker.

The two programs we will be needing to help us get our movie onto DVD are DVD Flick and ImgBurn. DVD Flick is a very cool open source program that you can use to convert just about any video on your computer into the DVD folder structure and format. Once converted, you will use ImgBurn to burn the newly created DVD folder to your DVD.

Step 1: Save edited movie from Windows Movie Maker

The first thing that you need to do is to create your movie in Windows Movie Maker. I am not going to go into how to use Windows Movie Maker in this post (maybe a future one), but if you just click around and read the menu items on the left, it won’t be hard to add titles, add transitions and add video effects.

After you have completed the movie, click on Save to my computer under the Finish Movie section.

This will export your modified movie to a Windows Movie Maker file, which will end in .WMV.

Step 2: Convert WMV to DVD format using DVD Flick

Now that we have our Windows Movie Maker video saved to the hard drive, we need to convert it to DVD format. That’s where DVD Flick comes in! Open the program and click on the Add Title button at the top right.

Not really sure why it’s called Add Title since it’s really video clips you are adding. If you made the full video in WMM, then you would simply browse to that video and select it. If you have multiple videos created via WMM or any other video you want to add to the DVD, just keep clicking Add title.

Note the left side bar will show you the percentage of the DVD that is full, so it’s really easy to figure out if you added too much video or not.

Once you have added all of your clip(s), go ahead and choose a destination folder for the converted DVD at the very bottom. By default, this folder will be completely erased every time you create a new DVD from DVD Flick. Note that it can take up to 4.7GB of space, so you to choose a drive that has lots of free space.

Next click on the Create DVD button at the very top menu. It’ll ask you if you want to proceed and that the data in that directory will be deleted.

Now just sit back and wait as it converts the videos into the DVD format. This can take up a good amount of time depending on how fast your computer is and how big the videos are. For a full DVD on my computer, it took almost 2 hours, so yours will vary.

Step 3: Burn files to DVD using ImgBurn

After the movie is converted, you can then use the free burning program ImgBurn to burn the files to DVD. Note that this is not a DATA DVD, it will be a video DVD that you can play in your regular DVD player like any other DVD movie, etc.

Start up ImgBurn and then click on the Write Files/Folders to Disc option.

Now click on the Browse for a folder icon in the menu at the top right.

Now browse to the folder on your hard drive where the files were exported from DVD Flick and select the dvd folder inside the main folder. Basically select the folder that is called dvd and that is the direct parent of both the AUDIO_TS and VIDEO_TS folders.

Insert a blank DVD and then click on the Build It button at the bottom left. It’s the one with the folder and the green icon pointing to the DVD.

That’s it! Once the DVD has completed being burned, you can pop it into your DVD player and you should now have your Windows Movie Maker video playing on your TV! If you know of an easier way to burn WMV files to DVD, post a comment! Enjoy!

Technorati Tags: burn wmv to dvd, convert wmv to dvd, convert wmv to dvd video, how to convert wmv files to dvd, convert wmv to play on dvd

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13 Responses to “How to burn Windows Movie Maker WMV video to DVD”

NISMO said on : June 2nd, 2008 at 5:39 pm

…and if you’re looking for completely FREE and powerful CD/DVD and Blu-Ray/HD-DVD burning application you’re welcomed to give a try to StarBurn from Rocket Division Software.

Just in case here’s an URL:

StarBurn

Arigato!

-ichiro

Kitkat said on : June 2nd, 2008 at 11:37 pm

Wow, that’s good. Now, I need to burn some porn DVDs.

akishore said on : June 3rd, 2008 at 12:08 am

Kitkat - hahahaha I will not endorse that, but sure go ahead if it works for you!

MJ said on : June 4th, 2008 at 10:00 am

Thanks for the info.

Elsie said on : June 8th, 2008 at 1:46 pm

i convected 4 videos with a total time of 14:31 minutes. went into IMGBURN and the file size was too big for my cd (870ish, cd 702) … any explaination ?

Janice Abel said on : June 19th, 2008 at 4:19 pm

Hey - the instructions were great but still I can’t get it to play on my DVD. it says, start up may not be on disc. I tried to save Movie Maker file to the hard disk using the AVI-(NTSC) as well as the one already selected. that does not help either. Any clues.

Tyler said on : June 22nd, 2008 at 2:24 pm

I made a slideshow in WMM for church and of course everyone wanted copies. No one there has a computer though so I was stuck with making DVD’s for everyone, thanks to this, I was able to do it.

Thanks a lot.

Gemma said on : June 23rd, 2008 at 4:48 pm

Do these tools have any way of putting multiple movies on, with a menu to choose between them?

(I’ve used other free tools to burn DVDs, but you don’t get any menu, so its a bit poor.)

CMK said on : June 25th, 2008 at 1:45 am

Janice-I had the same problem. Look in the video settings of DVD flick and make sure the video is set to NTSC. Mine was defaulted to PAL and that was the problem.

Janice Abel said on : June 19th, 2008 at 4:19 pm

Hey - the instructions were great but still I can’t get it to play on my DVD. it says, start up may not be on disc. I tried to save Movie Maker file to the hard disk using the AVI-(NTSC) as well as the one already selected. that does not help either. Any clues.

Lil said on : July 4th, 2008 at 1:37 am

Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!

Ann said on : August 10th, 2008 at 11:34 am

This was really easy to set up and do so many thanks. I have no sound on the dvd but I didn’t have any sound on the wmv file either so it must be a problem uploading from my camcorder. Anyone got any suggestions?

Antinous said on : August 21st, 2008 at 4:13 pm

Thank you very much fot the help.

Shae said on : August 24th, 2008 at 1:15 am

we downloaded a video from camera, created a movie, it says that we cannot save the movie to our computer, the original video before making the movie is still on our computer…..we cannot burn the movie onto dvd until we find out why it wont let us save to computer. The movie was very easy to create but need help in finding out why it wont save help please!!!!! Could use Intervideo launcher but cant find out how to turn the video vertical.