Burn a Playable DVD and Play on the HU

I was driving home today and was stucked in a jam so I fiddle with the HU. I usually listen to the songs I had in the HDD while driving. But today it suddenly occurs to me that I can probably use the DVD player to (at least) listen to some of the video recordings related to my work. Even if I can't watch the video I can still listen to the audio. Since I usually get stuck in a jam on the way to work and going home, maybe I should find a way to do that.

A reader has previously asked me the same question too. He burned some video files and try to play it on the giant's HU DVD player and couldn't get it to work. He tried multiple formats like VCD, DVD, MP4, AVI, RMVB etc but none seems to work.

So when I reached home I set out to do some online research to understand what format is supported by the giant HU's DVD player. I had a look in the manual and found that it does support DVD Video. So I read up a bit about DVD Video on the Internet trying to see if I can find some program that can do this easily. Well it seems someone already have found a simple way to convert videos into a playable DVD.

Instead of showing you steps-by-steps here I think it is easier for you to check out this page.

I choose NTSC format instead of PAL as that's the default format the giant HU DVD player support.

So I took some vidoe files I collected in my PC and drag them into the DVD Flick software. As mentioned in that post, the authoring of the DVD does take times. I tried to squeezed as much videos as I can into a 4.7GB single layer DVD disc and it took almost two hours for the authoring to complete! Also the program is very CPU intensive and it hover around the 100% utilization mark on my C2D E6750 2.66Mhz machine.

I chose to create an ISO file instead of burning it directly to the DVD. This allowed me to walk away from the PC during the authoring and when it is done I just burn the ISO file into a DVD.
After I burn the video files into a DVD+R with my favourite ISO tool, PowerISO, I tried it on my giant and it seems to play the DVD fine.

The DVD Flick software let you choose a pre-define menu page.

It also allow you the choose each video as a menu item. However doing it with the touch screen on the HU is quite a chore. I just decided to let it run on it own since my main aim is to listen to the audio only.

The DVDFlick program mentioned in the original article is for Windows platform only. If you have a Mac, try this page instead.

Have fun burning your own playable DVD.
Cheers