How to burn anime to a DVD

[Rekunoto]

Introduction

If you are anything like I was, then you may be completely lost when it comes to burning your favorite Anime to a DVD. Don't worry! Burning Anime is easy. Before I start let me outline what this guide will do and will not do for you.

This guide will
- Give you simple instructions to burning most video files to a DVD that you can watch on your home DVD player.

This guide will NOT
-Show you how to make Data disk with complex encoding.

Notice
This guide is to be used with Anime Suki's rules.


Materials

-A Blank DVD disk, either DVD+ or DVD- (Can get a spindle of 100 disks at walmart for 25$)

-A DVD burner
Looking at the front of your disk drive. Most drives will have prints like this on the front.

CD-R, CD+_RW, DVD, DVD+_RW, DVD+_RW DL

If you have anything that says DVD, you should be able to read DVDs, but to be able to burn them, you should have the RW and the DVD on your Optical Device tray.

If you have a DVD burner, keep reading this guide. If not, you can get one a walmart for like 50$. Make sure to get an External one, unless you want to remove drives on your computer to make room for a new Internal burner.

- Burning software
You will need a burning software. I suggest DVDsanta. You can buy a copy online. If your wallet doesn't meet the price, you could go online and find a torr.....Never mind . If you can't get DVDsanta, I suggest Nero. I haven't used Nero, but I only hear good about it. Two notes on burning software.

1. Try to get DVD santa, because the actual intsructions on this guide are made for that program
2. I suggest you stay away from "ConvertXtoDVD". I used it, and my video came out wide screen (A very thin picture, leaving the huge black bars on the top and bottom of the screen )

Instructions

So here we are, the flesh and blood of this article, the instructions.

1. Get the anime files you want to burn. You can do this through torrents, or direct downloads. If you are getting rmvb. files, get about 5 episodes. If you are getting AVI files, get around 3 episodes.

2. Open DVD santa

3. Click "Video files (AVI, WMV) to DVD

4. Drag and drop you anime files the you want to have on DVD (1-6 episodes) into the large white box towards the top, or just click "add media" and find your files.

5. Adjust your advanced settings. If you live in America, don't mess with the advanced settings, unless you know what you are doing. If you live in Europe change "NTSC" to "PAL"

6. Click "Create DVD" This will start to encode the files. Shut off all other windows you have open and let it encode. I just did this earlier. It took around 40 minutes to encode three episodes (109 minutes) on a Dell E310. You probably need to go watch TV or something, unless you enjoy looking at percentage bars

7. Once the files have done encoding, the writing prompt will come up. It will ask you to chose your DVD drive, and then enter a blank DVD. Then click "Burn" (Or "write" or whatever it says)

8. Let it burn the DVD. This should take less time then encoding, depending on how fast your DVD writer is. It took me around 7 minutes on a LITE ON DVD burner (Cheap brand lol)

9. Once it is finished, a sign will pop up saying "Done". The DVD drive will open up. Take the disc out.

10. Label the disk with a sharpie

11. Enjoy your anime on a TV screen in your house!



Please give feedback.

[GHDpro]

Have you actually tried this guide for yourself with various series and on several different TV/DVD sets?

A lot of people will probably experience they can't read the subtitles when you convert anime to DVD with Nero or any other common DVD burning application, because they don't take overscan into account.

Likewise, fansub groups don't take the fact that some people will want to convert their fansubs to DVD into account and will put subs at the edges of the screen. But especially with hardsubs there is little you can do about that. On the other hand, there are ways around overscan, although they add a layer of difficulty to the DVD conversion.

(I will not go into this further though -- search this forum for previous topics about DVD conversion)

[Rekunoto]

Actually, yes I have used this guide. Subtitles can be a problem, thanks for bringing it up. I am learning Japanese, so I don't depend on Subtitles that much. If the fansub's subtitles don't stretch out towards the edges of the screen, you should be safe.

[Jigsy]

I tried burning the first six episodes of sola to DVD.

The first three worked fine, but for the remaining three, all I had was some kind of "green screen of death" with audio ...


What exactly would of caused that?

[hobbes_fan]

btw on your comment on convertxtodvd you do know you can set it to 16:9 or 4:3 right? You also have to set your DVD player to your tv. ie 16:9 or 4:3.

[Loniat]

Good intention, bad execution. Try improving your howto. There is plenty of info around this forum about this subject, make some searches and see what you can pickup from there.