Use the best cables you can for connections. Video cables from (lowest to highest quality are), RF, composite, S-Video, Component. Which cables you use will be determined by the types of outputs and inputs on the DVD Recorder and the TV. That's all I can offer as far as the machine problem you may need to take it in for service or replace it..

This is real basic, so you videophiles don't blast me. It's meant to give a little insight in easy to grasp terms. I edit video as a hobby so if you want to know more, email me. Mini DVD utilizes MPEG-2 compression. MiniDV is AVI (Audio Video Interleave). Think of AVI as the old flip book cartoons. You have many pictures that change ever so slightly and they are played fast enough (29.97 fps (NTSC)) so that it creates the illusion of a moving picture. MPEG-2 differs in that instead of saving all the information for each 'frame' or picture as AVI does, it analyses the video and discards what it's compression formula deems unnessessary. This is what makes the file sizes so much smaller. MPEG-2 is notoriously bad when it comes to fast moving video for this reason. Basically when it comes to video, less compression makes for a better quality picture. MiniDV AVI has less compression. Editting - If your planning on editting your video, stick to MiniDV. MiniDVD will require you to decompress the video and then compress it again to burn onto a DVD. You lose quality each time. Both types of video camera's will allow you to plug into a television (monitor) and watch the video. Regular dual layer DVD burners are inexpensive. You can get a good quality one for around $80.00. Hi-Def - This would take a long time to really explain. Suffice it to say that HDV requires decompression and recompression. Unless you're going with Pro level equipment (editting bay included), I'd steer clear. A great, but expensive camera is the Canon XL2.

Susan. You should finalize the disc. you can use you computer to make as many copies as you like one they are on the disc and you have the nessessary hardware and software to do so. To answer your question on finalize it means that once you finalize a disc it can not be written to again (ever) Yes it can be copied

"You can use it to build DVD Video discs (from a VIDEO_TS folder)," That's from the description of ImgBurn so it sounds like it would probably work. BTW, if you right-click the VIDEO_TS folder and look at the properties, is it more than 4.36 gigs? I know that seems like an odd number but that's what will fit on a single layer DVDR. More than that and you'd either need to use a dual layer DVDR, or use something such as DVD Shrink to size it down to single layer before burning it. Truthfully, I almost exclusively use Linux now, and when I did Windows, I didn't use WMP much. I don't think you can not burn DVDs with it though, only audio CDs. Here is a link that might be useful: Of possible interest?