can anyone tell me how i can put my mini dv camcorder tapes onto cd-r?do i need special software or can it be done with windows media player or moviemaker?also how long of play is on a cd-r disc?will there be room for my tape or is mini dv large files?do i need to convert the dv files to a different format? thanks deana

Your mini DV camcorder records video in an AVI format. This can be recorded directly to a CDR and played back on your computer using Windows Media Player. You can also convert the video to Windows movie WMV and it will be much smaller. Or, if you want to playback on a DVD player, you can convert it to Mpeg for SVD compatible players, or Mpeg2 (higher resolution) for SVCD compatible DVD players.

There's a lot more than I can get into in one post. A lot of useful info can be found at http://www.dvdrhelp.com

Pinnacle Studio DV is your best bet budget software, you really should consider getting a DVD writer & slave HD of at least 80gig if you are doing dv editing, i know you can burn it in svcd format etc but you cant beat the orig dv recording! I do dv editing with Adobe Prem Pro, its a good option but rather complicated/costly, depends on how serious you are.A std CD-R holds around 650mb wheras a DVD+R will hold over 4gig.