How To: Create & Share Zeitgeist DVD’s

This guide will give you all you need to know about downloading and creating copies of the Zeitgeist films to share on DVD. You could hand them out to your friends and family, at your Zeitgeist event, or to give to complete strangers on the commute to work – be creative!

The Zeitgeist film series is free to download, watch, copy and share. In fact we encourage sharing! 🙂

You will need a Bittorrent program in order to download high quality copies of the films. The films available to download are of a higher quality than on YouTube, for example.

Resources required:

  • A quantity of blank DVD-R (Writable) discs. There are different types, but more on that in a moment.
  • A4 Disc label sheets. They’re self adhesive stickers that you can print on using a regular home printer then affix to the disc and DVD sleeve for a ‘professional looking’ touch.
  • DVD sleeves to store them in.

As a rough guide it is possible to produce 100 DVD’s, each with sleeve, disc and sleeve label for approximately £25 (25p per finished copy).


Downloading The Films

First you’ll need to install a Bittorrent client. This is a program that handles downloads to your computer: Download Bittorrent here (Freeware).

Single Layer DVD-R Discs – The most common, they hold 4.7GB worth of data.
Dual Layer DVD-R Discs – They’re a little more expensive but hold 7.95GB worth of data.

If you’re downloading Zeitgeist Addendum, it arrives in the correct size to fit on the cheaper single layer discs straight away. You can skip to the Burning Disc Images to DVD-R section below.
If you’re going for Zeitgeist Moving Forward however, it arrives in ‘dual layer’ format for best quality. You will need to decide whether to fork out slightly more for the dual layer discs or shrink the film down to single layer size.

Click the relevant link to start downloading. If prompted select to open the .torrent file with your Bittorrent program.

For the international version (NTSC) visit: zeitgeistmovie.com/torrents.html

 

Shrinking DVD’s Down To Single Layer

You will need a program such as DVDShrink (Freeware). Once you’ve installed the program and have the completed Zeitgeist Moving Forward .ISO file ready, here’s how to shrink it down.

Burning Disc Images to DVD-R

Method 1 – Windows 7 Built-in Functionality

If you use Windows 7, you have a disc image burner built in to the operating system. To use it, all you have to do it right click on the disc image file (.ISO) and select Burn disc image.
You cannot specify how many total copies you need so to burn multiple copies you would have to repeat this step. For larger productions look into ImgBurn below.

Method 2 – Freeware DVD Burning Program: ImgBurn

For a program that goes beyond the basics (and also for those that don’t use Windows 7)  give ImgBurn (freeware) a try. ImgBurn offers further options such as specifying how many total copies you’d like to burn and setting burn speed settings.

ImgBurn Instructions

Once installed, launch the program and click on Write image to disc file, a new window will appear.

In the top section, click the folder to browse to your disc image file (.ISO).

Set the Write Speed to 16x, or to whatever is shown on the disc itself, then indicate how many copies you’d like to burn.

Now once you insert a blank, writeable DVD, the Burn button will light up. Click it to start the process.

Coming soon: Printing your disc labels.