Best (free) program to create high quality picture CD's

Hardware and technical stuff
1

I’m making a set of picture CD’s (or DVD) for the neighbor kids so they can play the 940 pictures from them working/playing with the pond stuff - and watch it on their tv. I’ve tried a few programs, and so far I’ve failed to make test CD’s that will actually work in a DVD player.

So I’m looking for help with a program that makes a high quality CD/DVD that will have wide compatability to play on many DVD players. There’s 940 pictures (1.62 Gig of Data) that need to be transferred.

Thanks!

2

Well, Nero OEM should come with every dvd/cd drive one buys.

IMO the “best” format would be a plain data cd-rom iso as *.jpg files. The DVD player would need to be able to play it thought.

I think one of the oldest formats is probably a video-cd that kinda embeds the pictures - what it does is it creates a VCD (popular in Asian movies in the 80s) and just “plays” each picture for 2 seconds as a slideshow.

This of course makes it incredibly painful to browse, but it should work on the oldest machines.

3

I don’t have Nero OEM, and I tried using Win XP’s copy to CD thing (just pictures) and none of the DVD players we had would show the pictures on a test CD I made. I used one program called “Photo DVD Slideshow” to make a VCD thing, but on my DVD player it was pixelated mess, and on the kids DVD player it was unplayable.

Is there a difference between making an “ISO” of jpg’s, vs. using windows to just write them to the CD?

4

I’m pretty sure the Windows Xp burns a standard ISO. Standard ISOs are burnt in “sessions”. Once you close the session you can’t ever edit the CDR again. The reason to close it is because some car players wouldn’t read it unless you closed the session, or only read the last session you made, or etc.

They also have some sort of “Live File System” - UHF something or other. You don’t want that. Very few dvd players will play them.

Sourceforge has a bunch of ISO burners. I haven’t used any of these extensively, but I’ve seen them recommended often.

http://isorecorder.alexfeinman.com/isorecorder.htm

Why don’t you google up that dvd player’s manual to see which formats it does support?