So I bought a DVD Burner. It's very good but the media isn't too hot. Anyway, first test was to rip Donnie Darko off an existing DVD and then see if it would go straight back onto a blank one.
Using DVD Decryptor, I grabbed an ISO image of the DVD. After a few problems with Nero not wanting to play nicely, I upgraded the firmware on the drive to cope with my crap media. DVD Decryptor kindly stepped in to burn the image to a DVD-R. Into our old LG DVD player.... it worked!
Second step. Grab some episodes of Sharpe off t'Internet courtesy of eMule and burn them.
Easier said than done. The .avi files I got needed to be converted to MPEG2, the video format used for DVD. I got TMPGEnc to do this, but converting each movie takes ~3 hours. And the first few times I was just guessing as to exactly which format it needed to be in.
So on Saturday I finally got it right, and used TMPG DVD Author to create the files necessary to burn a DVD. Smithers was back, so I didn't bother making menus and shit - we needed Sean Bean on screen.
Nero was once again playing twats with me, destroying two DVDs in the process. I got imgtool burn to sort that out, and after reducing the burn speed from 4x to 2x, Sharpe was ours.
If I'd just bought the barnar and not known anything about DVD stuff I'd have been screwed at the first - I wouldn't have known to update the firmware. It should have been a lot easier. Still - Sharpe!