In the distant past I've used Windows Movie Maker to edit small videos I've captured on a video camera and it seemed to work OK. I never did anything serious and never tried to put anything on DVD using the writing software that came in Windows. In general, I hate the fact that I can't find anything because MS OS's have sprouted so many things I don't really want.
Over the last few days I thought I would try to be normal and use the stuff built in to Windows 7, so I got my trusty, pretty old, KWorld usb DTV receiver, found some drivers on the net and got it receiving. All pretty good, so I set it to record a documentary about Leonard Cohen. It recorded fine, and turned out to be interesting eg in the way the PA system was a disaster and the band appeared to be trying to refund money in various European countries in pre-Euro currencies that they didn't understand.
So I thought I'll put it on to DVD using the various Microsoft Tools.
Looked at Windows DVD Maker, but that seemed to have no editing facilities, so installed Windows Live to get Movie Maker.
Ran Movie Maker, found where they had hidden all the controls in this version and "topped and tailed" the recording.
The options in Movie maker included "DVD", so I chose that. Some hours later I was presented with a wmv file, which seemed a bit odd. It also appeared that Movie Maker doesn't hook into the writing software, so I loaded Windows DVD Maker again and set that to produce a DVD. This then embarked on another multi-hour conversion process but threw a DVD out at the end. First time I've used a dual layer DVD, so that was good.
Unfortunately, when I played it, the audio and the lips were about a sentence out of sync, so it's completely useless. The whole process had taken from before lunch until some time at night after I'd gone to bed.
Searching through the system to find the various files, it seems that the original .wtv file is in sync, but the .wmv file produced from it is hopelessly out. I think the DVD has about the same timing problem.
I'm trying this on a 2.2GHz laptop with 2Gigs of ram
There are other weird things about the TV facilities in Win 7. If I watch TV and then record a bit, opening Media Player gives me one programme, Media Center gives a different one. I assume that this is because one points at the automatic "pause while watching" recording, whereas the other points at the wanted recording.
Has anyone else tried this? Did it work? Did you make any sense of any of it?