So the good news is that my taiyo yuden disks just arrived, and I can now make error free copies of my home movies. what joy. Not sure why the disks that i have got with phillips embossed on them should be so appalling, but I got 100 of these super ones for 40 quid incl p&p from verity systems (£27 before).
The bad news is that I just discovered that windows dvd maker is good at making my machine reboot, often requiring a safe mode start up to recover from the shock, but not much use at making anything else, certainly not a 160 picture slideshow.
I understand that I can do everything, including slideshows and burning DVDs with my vegas 9 which should be landing any second now. Home videos are great of course, but you can get people who dont even like you to watch your slideshows with some decent backing music, and they take minutes to knock out, as long as you dont try and use microsft media tools to do it!.
70 quid on an oem edition of vista home premium, easily the worst buy of this whole upgrade proceedure.

Glad you're getting good copies now.

Just to be pedantic, Vegas does NOT allow you to burn DVDs.

Vegas is USUALLY sold with a separate product - DVD Architect (or DVD Architect Studio if you're buying one of the Movie Studio versions of Vegas) for authoring/burning DVDs.

I'm not sure whether it's still possible to buy the products separately and indeed whether it's just an OEM version that doesn't include Architect, but I thought I'd better mention it so you can check you've got what you expect before you open the package.

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Tim

Oh, well, one of my mottoes, quite appropriate in these circumstances, is "we'll burn that bridge when we come to it".
Windows DVD maker is succeeding to make DVDs of films, but when I tried throwing a slide show at it it just exploded rather spectacularly. I assume I can make a slideshow film in vegas and output an avi then get microsoft to do the menus for me and sort out a disk if I dont have dvd architect in there as a freebie.
My initial requirement of course was just to be able to turn the m2t files into avi. If vegas can do an honest job of that I'll be happy.
The goodies arrive tomorrow, i was being optimistic with royal mail. I'll doubtless be providing a status report along with my latest conundrum.

I'm 99.9% certain it'll be the Vegas and DVDA Package - unless you bought it off eBay or similar. But whatever, you will certainly be able to do what you're outlining above. Enjoy and expect to waste many many hours improving your skills

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Tim

I assume I can make a slideshow film in vegas

You assume correctly. You may find you have to resize the photos before adding them to the timeline. Pro 8 is meant to have issues with large image files - I say meant to because I've done a few now without resizing (or converting) any jpegs and without any issues at all. Also Pro 9 is supposed to improve on this by adding support for gigapixel images.

I used to use ProShow Producer but found I invariably had to output as uncompressed AVI and encode using something else because of quality issues.

wow.
vegas turned up today. I needed to install the v 9b upgrade before it would render my 1,400 photo slideshow without getting upset, but all in all it's quite awesome isnt it.
dvd architect came with it, and some stuff called cinescore.
still getting my head round the 0.05% of the functionality i'm going to need for my domestic duties. and i havent started working through the video backlog I've amassed, but generally gobsmackingly impressive. and i dont have to put up with that cheesy apple logo on my dvds!

I'd call that a result. Cinescore is quite a good app producing loads of variations (though I prefer the control I have over SmartSound, and the themes as wel, but I regularly use both).
Enjoy!l

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Tim