DVD

My daughter put together a video for a class project. She and her co-conspirators wrote a script, put together the props, filmed the action, edited the results into a coherent story, and wrote it all to a single video file. Okay, now all we have to do is burn this file on a DVD and she should be ready to deliver this to school. Simple, eh?

No, it is not. You might think with the proliferation DVD burners, Windows would have built in support for this kind of thing, but you would be wrong. I got roped into this project about 10PM Sunday night and I spent the next three hours chasing my tail and burning disks, none of which met the criteria for delivery: we had to be able to put the disk in the DVD player connected to the TV and have the movie play.

I was able to create a DVD disk that would act like that on my wife's laptop, but it would not play in the SONY combination DVD / VHS player connected to the TV. I was also able to burn a CD that would play in the DVD player, but it would not play until you selected item #1 (the only item) and pressed the GO button.

Once you cross over into the realm of making DVD's it is like entering another world. Nothing is normal, everything is arcane jargon, no one is interested in what you want. I imagine it is something like being in the middle East. I did learn a couple of things. Burning DVD's is a slow process, and converting video files from one format to another is an even slower process. There do not seem to be any free software packages that support this operation either. I did download one program for a two week free trial. It seems to support all the necessary operations, but it has so many options I was just shooting in the dark when I burned a disk.

I think I got pretty close, after all I was able to play one in the laptop as though it was a movie disk, but it would not play in the SONY. Of course, this may have been due to the media (a ten disk package of DVD-R disks from Office Depot for $8) or to the burner I used in the laptop.

Eventually I got together with my son and we burned a CD using Imgburn that met the requirements. Much easier than burning a DVD. I probably could have done it myself if it hadn't been one o'clock in the morning.

I could have researched all this stuff on the internet and probably discovered just exactly what I needed to know to successfully perform this operation, but you know, I did not really want to know all this arcane flim-flammery. This is the kind of stuff I get paid to know, and right now my brain is full. Anything new I push into my brain pushes some old, hard won knowledge out. Of course, learning new stuff is good mental exercise. It keeps you flexible and prevents ossification. But gol durn it, you have to draw the limit somewhere, and I really don't want to know any more crap about computers. There are too many other things in life that are more interesting.

When I worked for Intel in Phoenix lo these many years ago, we kept a room full of microcomputers for testing. We probably had two or three dozen of them, and they were all different. There were Multi-Bus I & II, 8086, 80186, 80286, 386 and even some 486 CPU's, and there were probably two or three models of CPU board for each CPU chip. There were IDE and SCSI hard disks and controllers, tape drives, multi-channel serial controllers. One and two board ethernet controllers, etc. etc.

Some of these systems got used extensively, some rarely. What I found was that I could keep about three systems current (with all the latest updates) and operational. Any more than that and I wasn't getting any work done. It was a matter of how much useful information your brain can store and how many hours are in a day. Three systems may not seem like much, but that was my practical limit.

Update December 2016 replaced missing pictures.