Microsoft was kind enough to include a “Burn to CD” wizard directly within Movie Maker. To access it, simply go to the task menu and click the “Save to CD” link. A CD-writing wizard will pop-up and you can choose what format of video you’d like to save to CD.

However … you might not want to use this built in CD burner function!

You see, for some reason Microsoft decided to limit the output options within the “save to CD” wizard. There are less video formats to choose from … you can’t choose the highest WMV9 settings, but have to make do with a lower quality setting. I don’t know why they did this.

If you do want to burn your video to CD-ROM at the highest available WMV9 setting (you’ll fit about 30 minutes of video onto a CD using the “high quality” setting), you need to export the video file to your hard drive first. You can then copy this file onto a CD using burning software like Roxio or Nero.

Or, you could just use Windows XP’s built-in CD-writing ability. Simply hi-light the video file with your mouse, then click “Write to CD” in the left handed menu bar. The file will be copied into a virtual “ready to be burned” queue. When you are ready to actually burn the final CD, go to My Computer, click on the CD-Writer drive, and click “burn CD.”

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