I have a software burning program called Ashampoo Burning Studio 10. It has a menu that allows you to properly format the burn in order to be able to play the DVD in a DVD player as well as on a computer. The problem you have described above sounds like a formatting issue when the DVD was originally burned.   -- Ace --

You have windows movie maker?Nero,will work, but complex,plenty of free programs to burn a dvd movie.It sounds like you have a movie on a disc without udf format or internal menus with labels to direct the player, pc's play avi files and many others which a portable may have no codecs or  drivers for.UDF=universal digital format.What does your camera render video files as? Avi,DVx,many others. You will maybe need to convert the file which would need a program able to do so. Hope it helps ya.

A late thought. Your camera probably is using mpeg files.

Aces suggestion is free I believe and also DVDFab and that is what I would use, very user friendly.

First and foremost, you need to identify your friend's DVD player and check to see if it is capable of playing a home made DVD and if so, what format of DVD it will accept.

There are thousands of different players out there so I would verify his model and check this site to verify if it will accept a DVD+R or -R before I went any further.

Tip: For playback on a device other than which it was burned on, DVD -R is the proper type blank disc to use.  +R can work, but -R has a higher success rate.