View digital photos in home DVD player?

Gazette Reader Frank K. writes:

" Dear Dennis,

I've taken all of my photos and scanned them into the computer. I later decided to record the photos to CD so that I could archive them permanently and view them at my leisure.

A friend of mine told me that my home DVD player can also play image files, much like a 'photo CD'. The problem is that the photo CD that I made only plays some of the image files. Can you tell me why this is so, and how I can go about correcting the problem? "

My response:

Most DVD players can play only play .JPG (or 'JPEG') image files. Image files come in all sorts of flavors, such as .GIF, .JPG, .BMP, .PNG, .IFF, and a heck of a lot more.

If you want to ensure that the image files can play in your DVD player:

  1. Refer to your DVD manual and verify which image type(s) it can view (it's most likely JPG).
     
  2. Put your photo CD into your computer, and use a image file converter to convert all the images into the format that is compatible with your DVD player; save the files temporarily to your hard drive. Note that you won't want to convert all of these files 1 at a time, so you'll need to seek out a program that is capable of batch converting the images. I believe Irfanview (freeware) is capable of batch-converting image files.
     
  3. Once all the files have been converted into 1 format, record them on to CD (in "data CD" format) using your favorite CD burning application. If your DVD player supports CD-RW (rewriteable) media, you might want to do a 'test' record just in case there is a problem (you can always erase the RW disc and start over).

Good luck!

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