Our students (100 of them) have created Power Point Presentations. We would like to burn these onto a DVD so that they can play in a home computer, or on a DVD player. Each student has a presentation of a state in the USA. Can we burn these from a hard drive onto a disc and insert chapters, or make them interactive at all...or do we need Nero software or software like that to be able to create chapters and/or selections? We would like the DVD to have a menu where the kids and their parents can scroll/move and select that state and then click and watch that portion of the DVD. Software? or is it possible without purchasing something expensive. We would, of course, have to buy software for lots of computers if software if needed. Thanks. You guys are so smart! Always so helpful. Much appreciated.

If you have Nero, it will work for you, but it won't convert PowerPoint to dvd. Do a search for converting powerpoint to dvd and you'll get a list of results for the softwares you can use.

Also, if the video is going to be all states, and depending on how long each presentation is going to be, you may need to burn them on 8.5G dvd's.

You can take a graphics of the USA map and set regions for each state, meaning that each state can be clicked on and the presentation will load up for that state. Most of what you want to do can be done with Nero, but the converting of the presentations is the main job at hand.

Another option you may wish to consider is the built-in "package for cd" function from within PP itself.
If you're not familiar with it, you just copy all the presentations to your HD then add them all using the package for cd function via the file menu. In the options menu you can choose to let the user pick the individual presentations he\she wants to see so that they don't have to watch the whole thing if they don't want to. It will play on any computer regaurdless of wether PP is installed or not because it adds the necessary files to the cd\dvd. It will not work in a home dvd player however.

You could always use a free program for screen recording and start the presentations and record them to avi or mpeg straight from the screen.

Example program ZD Screen Recorder
http://downloads.zdnet.co.uk/0,1000000375,39291419s,00.htm

You could then use Nero to add the avi files to the DVD with a menu structure.