Making a slideshow w/music presentation. Help?

[ShinyGreenApple]

My nephew will be having a home school graduation ceremony at a local church. The church is very up to date as far as their electronics and sound systems, so that's not a problem. Each student is allowed up to 9 minutes for them and their family to take the stage and do whatever, and most of them will put together a slideshow of pictures that show them growing over the years, as well as a selection of music. I've done plenty of music videos, etc, that I've posted on YouTube, and I'm fairly proficient in Windows Move Maker, but I have no idea what I'm supposed to do to get a hard copy of said video. I have blank CD-RW and DVD-R discs, but are either of those going to work?

I really love doing this kind of thing, and I'm excited about doing this for him, but I need a few nudges in the right direction, lol.

[Broomjockey]

Right, this is where things get tricky. You say the place is "up to date" in their electronics, but unfortunately, that doesn't help terribly much. Is there any way you can get access to the disc player before the day? Because really, the only thing you have to do is make sure that the file you make is of a kind that the player can read. Maybe someone else knows the most common format that DVD players will read on DVD-Rs, but I don't. What I do know is it's pretty much just a matter of burning the file on to the DVD (or CD, if the file's small enough), same as you'd burn music on to a CD. Then you should just need to pop it in and go.

If you can pop it in before that day, to test it out, then you'll know upfront if it works or not.

If you want something guaranteed to work without testing, you're going to need to make either an .iso file, or something similar to it, and that's a lot of work if you don't have someone who's done it before.

[1756GR2]

I did a slideshow with music in Windows Movie Maker for a friend's wedding. I ran the .wmv through Convertxtodvd with no trouble, burned it right to DVD with the same program. It's played on several systems.

A friend found it for free some time back, but it looks like the only current free version is the trail version which will do the job but burn a watermark on the video. Perhaps looking around will turn up the free version for you if you're interested in it.

[ShinyGreenApple]

They told me a simple PowerPoint presentation with music added will work. I don't have PowerPoint, I have Open Office Impress and . . .

Frakking hell I give up. I want to murder the people who write these programs

[Pedersen]

OpenOffice.org Impress can easily save as PowerPoint. It reads them, too.

[ShinyGreenApple]

But I can't figure out how to put the music on And I know that if we have my sister make it and send it to us, she's going to hassle us about the music, no matter what nephew picks out. She's kind of . . . crazy conservative.