I'm trying to send an avi movie file to a friend of mine in Japan so she can watch it on her computer. I would have just burned the file onto a DVD as an MPEG, but her home player will not play R or RW DVD's. So to do this,I need to do two things. One, I need to shrink the 975 MB avi file down to below 700 MB's so I can fit it onto a CD. Second, I need to edit in subtitles.

I haven't had much luck with one piece of software I tried, CyberLink PowerDirector. It's a great program and I was able to load the subtitles, just fine. However when I went to click on "Produce or "Create Disk", everything crashed. I may not have had the right patch in it though, so I may try reinstalling it.

I also have Ulead MovieFactory Plus which will also edit in subtitles, however, this program appears to just be geared for burning onto DVD. No editing or shrinking then saving onto the hard drive.

I really think this can't be that hard to get completed. I think adding the subtitles is the hardest part, but I have already downloaded the srt file, so I just need a good install program first. Even nicer would be a program that installs the subtitle and then burns it onto a CD or allows me to save it to my hard drive as an avi file. I should mentioned, I've also tried some of the smaller third party subtitle utilities without much luck.

But then all of this messing around with the subtitles will not do any good unless I can shrink this thing to fit on a cd!
I'm very much looking forward to hearing some suggestions.

I think the best course of action is to first of all get the subtitles added to the file. The method described here seems pretty straight forward.

Once you've got the AVI file sorted with subtitles, then you have the finished article work with. You can then take a look at another program to lower the file size. You could lower the bit rate of your AVI file or convert to another format such as WMV or MPEG. Then you can use one of the program described above to burn the film to CD. I often find that when undertaking projects like this, I use many different programs rather than just one complete thing. That way it's in easy steps and I believe problems can be rectified easier.