Tech Tip Tuesday: Recording What Plays on my Mac to a DVD

Occasionally, you get a video file, either via your own
creation through say iMovie or FCP, or you acquire it from
the web, and you want it to end up on DVD, so instead
of watching it on your computer, you can watch it
on DVD, and have it also preserved for posterity.

I do this on a semi regular basis with stuff that will
play on my Mac, say in either Safari or Firefox,
but for some reason hoses when trying to convert
through Quicktime or VisualHub to DVD.
I use a DVD-R Recorder ( non Hard Drive based)
to record the content to a Blank DVD-R.

To accomplish what I'm about to describe to do,
You'll need two things:

1. An Apple DVI to Video adapter, or this one if you have a mini dvi jack, and if your DVD Recorder
accepts video via S-Video, an S-video Cable like
this one here at Radio Shack.

2. A Y Plug ( Stereo mini 1/8in on one side, that goes "Y" to two RCA stero
(R/W) plugs, to hook into your Mac's Headphone port.
Again, Radio Shack carries what you need.


Now For the playback.

1. With Video adapter in, set your Mac to Mirror Desktop out to the input
ports of the DVD Recorder.
With a TV or a Monitor hooked to the DVD Recorder's Video Out,
make sure video signal is recieved. If not, set video inputs
on DVD Recorder until you get the Mac's Desktop displayed.
This may take setting the Video Input on the DVD Recorder
to accept S-Video input, if it naturally doesn't do so, or
setting the input, rear or front, to accept Video in.
Check with your recorder's manual for settings.

2. Hook up "Y" stereo cable to mac headphone out to
the DVD Recorder's audio Inputs.

3. Play the Video on your Mac.
If the file is say Flash Video, if you have downloaded it from
the website, you should be able to play it back in either
Quicktime Player or MpegStreamclip, with the Perian
Quicktime component.
You can then play it back Full Screen on your
Mac, and thus get Full Screen out to the DVD Recorder ( make sure
to hide the dock first, and turn off any screen savers, and apps
that might bounce in the dock like System Updates, Entourage, Mail,
etc.) I mostly use MpegStreamclip for this, as it allows for Full Screen
Playback Natively. Quicktime Player would have to be upgraded
to the PRO version to enable this feature.

if you are getting good playback, and you are getting good sound
(Keep the System sound up at 70% or higher)
then after one run through to make sure everything
goes out ok, you'll be ready to record directly to the DVD Recorder.
Insert a Blank DVD-R, (I prefer Tayio Uden blanks), and
record.

If you cannot download the video file,Say it is a video streaming file
embedded in a browser, you could try and record the stream
by playing it back in QT Pro or MpegStreamclip, but buffering issues
will cause you to have some skips and stutters as it fills the buffer.
Just be aware of that and know that will be your trade off
if you can't download it to the Mac and have to play it streaming.