Viewing video UDF files

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Peter Stedman
Posts: 275
Joined: Wed Oct 17, 2007 8:06 am
Location: Wiltshire

Viewing video UDF files

Post by Peter Stedman »

A friend has passed to me a DVD of some Christmas video from 2012. He said he couldn’t play it at all. Tried it here at home with several players to no avail. Checked the disc and see that it’s a UDF file. Did a quick check online and see that one needs to convert it. I have the Freemake video converter prog but that didn’t want to know either. Any suggestion on this one please?

My friend also had copied several jpegs from his laptop to a DVD but although the disc shows 1GB used neither he nor I can see the actual files listed on the disc or open to view the pics. (Oh Lord – it’s my age again).

Cheers. Pete.
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TimStannard
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Joined: Fri Feb 11, 2011 5:20 pm
Location: Surrey

Re: Viewing video UDF files

Post by TimStannard »

A UDF (Universal Data Format) file is an image of a disc - in this case most probably a DVD. It is NOT a copy of a DVD, but is commonly stored on a computer hard drive and used for creating (burning) DVDs. You may well have come across ISO files which are the same sort of thing. You cannot simply copy them to a DVD and expect them to play, you need to use a program that can read/write this format. I highly recommend the free imgburn. I suggest you obtain a copy, from http://www.imgburn.com and install it on your PC. Copy the UDF onto your PC, then, in imgburn, select the UDF file from your PC and write it to a rewritable DVD.

Here's a bit of detail about ISO and UDF http://www.differencebetween.net/techno ... f-and-iso/

Why do we bother?

Well, every DVD (by which I mean a video DVD - something that can play in a domestic DVD player) I create contains at least two folders (VIDEO_TS and AUDIO_TS) and maybe several files. I could save all these files to my hard disk and then reconstruct a DVD every time I wanted to create a new copy. But clearly there is plenty of scope for me getting this wrong (missing a file or two, not putting files in the correct folders etc) and ending up with an unplayable and wasted DVD.

On the other hand, once I've created a perfect master DVD (or indeed BluRay), I pop it back into my PC and use ImgBurn to create a single ISO file which I can use in the future to create more DVDs should I need to. Much easier to archive and quicker to burn and doesn't require me to load up my DVD authoring program.

If I use a duplicating service (as I am at the moment to create about 300 DVDs of 3 different nativities - Ahhhh, bless 'em) I upload an ISO of the DVD to them.

As for the jpegs- if you can't see them on a PC I suspect he hasn't finalised the disc.
Tim
Proud to be an amateur film maker - I do it for the love of it
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Peter Stedman
Posts: 275
Joined: Wed Oct 17, 2007 8:06 am
Location: Wiltshire

Re: Viewing video UDF files

Post by Peter Stedman »

Thanks Tim,
I have 'imgburn' on my machine so will follow this up.
His disc with the jpegs I will take back to him and follow that up. You must forgive him - he's only 93 (and I'm catching up fast).
Pete
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