I’ve got a few movies on my laptop, all of which are in widescreen format and saved as AVIs. They are absolutely fine, play fine in widescreen on my laptop and even using my HDMI connection, play fine in widescreen when hooked up to my TV. I then decided to burn these onto DVD so people could watch them on the TV without having to wait until I wasn’t using my laptop.
Windows DVD Maker is really good. It is easier and better than any of the free tools in previous versions of windows or as part of DVD recording software packages I’ve used in the past. All you have to do is add the video files, choose a menu design and then click burn. This worked fine for the first one I did but since then it’s been taking widescreen videos, adding them to a widescreen menu and then playing the resulting DVD in 4:3 format instead of 16:9. Even changing the very limited options does nothing – it ignors choosing either 4:3 or 16:9 from the options menu – it still burns everything in 16:9!
Turns out the simplest solution is actually more free Microsoft software – namely Windows Live Movie Maker. All you have to do is download it, install it and then follow the below instructions to create your DVD.
- Open Windows Live Movie Maker, Add your movie.
- Click on the View tab and set the Aspect Ratio to Widescreen
- Publish the file in Widescreen format
You can then use the new video file to create your DVD. Simples.