dvd burner | Picasa | Forums

Debbie,

You're not alone in your confusion!  DVD formats and DVD players (TVs) are not standardized.  Usually, when people talk about DVDs – they are referring to movies, like Pirates of the Carribbean or Social Network.  If you put one of those movie DVDs into your computer and look at the contents, you will see .VOB files.  It is a very specialized format for playing in a DVD player (TV.)  

When you burn a disk using Picasa's 'Gift CD' command – you are just creating a data disk.  If you look at the contents, you will see .jpg files – pictures.  Now … most DVD players will display .jpg files, but not all, and you don't have control over the sequence – or adding music, or timing etc.

So, bottom line, what you need:

1. buy any old external DVD burner.  I'm sure some are better than others, but there's nothing special needed – just the ability to burn data to a DVD instead of a CD

2. Create your disk of pictures using something like Windows DVD maker – it will create .vob files so it will play in any DVD player.  I have a video on this at:

/2010/10/using-dvd-maker/

Hope that helps.