One of the great things about the new generation of DVD player built into the modern TV DVD Combi is that you can watch more than just films and your favourite programmes. Nowadays, more and more people are using their combi televisions as a way to view their family photo albums in the comfort of their armchairs rather than huddled around the computer screen. In the rest of this blog post, I will explain how you can do just that.
TV DVD Combi
There are actually several ways in which you can view photos on your TV, but some of them get bogged down in compatibility issues and others require you to buy extra pieces of equipment. The methods I describe here may not be the most technologically advanced, but they are easy to do and will work with most modern TVs with built-in DVD players.
A basic option for viewing photos on your TV DVD Combi is not to use the DVD player at all, but to connect your digital camera to the TV using an AV (audio visual) cable that is usually supplied with the best digital cameras. This allows you to view photos but only the ones that happen to be on the camera’s memory card at the time, and you can only control the slide show by using the camera controls.
A better solution is to use the DVD player that’s built into your combi television. This costs pennies now that writeable DVD disks have come down so much in price. You will need a computer with a DVD writer, of course, and you will also need a DVD burning program. Many computers come with DVD burning software installed, but if you don’t have a DVD burning program, you can easily download a free one from the internet. Two popular free programs for DVD burning are ImgBurn and CDBurnerXP – just search Google and you will find them.
The first thing that you need to do is prepare the “show” by getting on the computer and deciding which photos you want to burn onto a DVD. Usually, you just drag the files into the window of the DVD burning program and then follow the instructions to burn the disk. It’s very easy to do. Then you simply whip the disk out and slide it into the DVD player of your TV DVD Combi.
One drawback of the above method is that you will in many cases need to use the TV remote control to move onto the next photo, and you will get no special effects like fading in and out. It will make for a far more interesting experience if you can get a little more advanced and add things like fading, zooming in and out and perhaps a few captions and credits. You can do this pretty easily by using a simple video editing tool such as Windows Movie Maker, which comes with Windows XP and Vista, or iMovie which comes with Macs. If you don’t have either, free alternative video editing tools are readily available on the internet. Using a video editor means that you can create your own slick slide show, zooming in on areas of interest, fading between images, sliding the next image in from the left, or the right and so on. You can also add text to the images and maybe put some credits on at the end. It just makes the whole slide show that little bit more appealing when you show it to your family and friends on your TV DVD Combi, and you don’t need to click anything to move onto the next picture so you can just sit back in your armchair and enjoy the show.
I hope you found this interesting and that you have some fun making your slide shows and viewing them on your TV DVD Combi.
