Burn a single HD video into a DVD without losing quality

Question

I created a video (slideshow of 14.2MP photos and music) using Windows Live Movie Maker. The video's resolution is 1440x1080 and is as WMV with 840MB.

Now what I want is to burn that HD video (no menus, no other videos) into a DVD so it can be playable on any DVD player and watchable on a TV. Is there any way to burn it without losing quality? I tried Nero, Windows Live Movie Maker burn dvd option and Wondershare DVD Creator. The video quality got worse in all of them (Nero's being the worse and Wondershare's the better) with loss of sharpness, sometimes minor jpeg artifacts and some color changes.

I believe there must be a way to do it because:

• the DVD still has 3.80GB free, so why compressing it?
• the movie DVD's image quality is great so what are they using to do it?

Is there any software to burn the video without losing the original quality? Should I compress the video to 720x480 using specialized software /which one?) before burning it?

Answer 1

The short answer is "No." DVD by definition is limited to 720x480 video with a fairly low bitrate, compressed specifically with MPEG-2. There is absolutely no way to make your HD video look just as good with those constraints.

Some DVD players do let you play .mp4, .mkv, or whatever files that happen to be stored on a DVD, but that isn't a standard function of DVD players in general.