Introduction
DVD Authoring software is used to create digital video disks which can be played on a DVD player. If you have videos of birthday parties, farewell celebrations, Christmas events, singing, dancing, playing pranks and all your beloved memories that are hiding on your video cameras, mini disks, VHS cassettes, tapes, etc, think of using this software to transfer them to DVDs, which are a good alternative for a low-cost storage device for playing back on a DVD player and sharing with your relatives and friends.
Now without needing to edit these videos one by one on your video editing software, you could use DVD authoring software that lets you create and burn videos with interactive menus in various templates, split videos into chapters for easier navigation, add subtitles and audio tracks to these menus, cut scenes from videos and even create photo slideshows with considerable ease.
You could also use powerful video editing software to edit and save your videos and then only use DVD authoring software to import them for adding menus, chapters and the like before burning into DVDs.
Rated Products
Platforms/Download: Windows (Desktop) |
Version reviewed: n/a
Gizmos Freeware
| Our Rating: 4/5 |
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Other DVD authoring freeware
- Bombono DVD, a cross-platform DVD authoring program accepting mp4, mov, mkv, avi and other video formats, with motion menus and subtitles support. The Linux version is free. The Windows version comes in with a commercial edition and a free edition with limited features.
- DVD Author Plus, create DVD video discs, read and convert most common video formats to DVD, together with other features such as burn data discs, duplicate CD/DVDs, backup CD/DVD in ISO format and create CDs and DVDs from an ISO file.
- DeVeDe for Linux is an open source program to create video DVDs and CDs (VCD, SVCD or CVD) from any number of video files including mpeg, mpeg4, avi, asf, YouTube and Google flash videos, wmv, ogg, etc.
- Koyote Video to DVD - I had not expected this program to be much use but was pleasantly surprised to find that it was very good. It allows you to build a menu, choose a background, rename individual titles, and other settings. Does the job well.
- DVD Styler - "A a cross-platform DVD authoring application for the creation of professional-looking DVDs. It allows not only burning of video files on DVD that can be played practically on any standalone DVD player, but also creation of individually designed DVD menus". Note: Opt to download the portable version which is free of bundled software, otherwise take great care during the installation process.
Related Products and Links
You might want to check out these articles too:
- Best Free CD-DVD Burning Software
- Best Free Video Editor
- Best Free Audio-Video Format Conversion Program
- Best Free Software to Split, Trim or Join Video Files
- Best Free CD-DVD Emulation Software
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Comments
I tried AVStoDVD and it seemed to work. It took 30 minutes (on my slow laptop) to encode about 30 min of video made up of 9 separate 3-ish minute videos. I used the NoInstall (ie portable) version from here: https://www.videohelp.com/download/AVStoDVD_286_NoInstall.7z
My videos were MP4's with AVC / H.264 compression, downloaded from youtube using FlashGot in Firefox.
Apparently "AVS" stands for AviSynth which is a video scripting language used by AVStoDVD.
All was not paradise, however. AVStoDVD uses ImgBurn by default, which is does NOT download with itself. Note ImgBurn is (by default) bundled with the accursed OpenCandy (see http://www.techsupportalert.com/content/imgburn.htm-3).
I did not already have ImgBurn installed, so AVStoDVD set the default output option to "DVD folder structure" except it creates that structure on the hard drive, not on the DVD medium, if there's no burner set. These are the VIDEO_TS and AUDIO_TS files you typically see on DVDs.
So I thought I was all done except that there was no colored inner ring on the disk indicating the part that was written and it did not play in a DVD player (because AVStoDVD never in fact wrote anything to the DVD). So I explored more and that's when I discovered AVStoDVD only wrote to my HDD.
I could not figure any way to get AVStoDVD to write the folders it created to the disk. I think AVStoDVD's "burn" function is performed by a call to an external program.
I had CDBurnerXP (who's name--but not function--is getting a little dated) installed, and it burns ISOs to disk, or DVD folders to disk--which is what I now had--so I used CDBurnerXP to do the final burn. But CDBurnerXP will not do the first part--it will not go from a set of files to disk.
So between the two programs, I got it done.
I liked this a lot: AVStoDVD creates a DVD menu automatically. The default is a screen with a picture for each video file with the filename in text underneath it. The pictures are in a 4-wide x 3-high grid, by default. I think it goes on to a second page automatically if you have more than 12, but I only had 9. You can go into edit mode and drag the pictures around and edit the text. There were a lot of menu editing functions that I did not try.
When you're done editing, the preview was SLOW (but again, slow laptop). Took about maybe 4 seconds per video file to construct the dvd menu preview.
I recommend AVStoDVD.
https://sourceforge.net/projects/avstodvd/
I tried DVD Flick first and the audio was out of sync every time it encoded.
Next I tried DVD Styler, and made a neat custom menu with it. The resulting DVD played fine on one DVD player (a really old one), got stuck on the menu on the second DVD player, and played with a stutter on an Xbox 360.
Then I tried AVStoDVD with no menu. It played fine on all three.
Tried DVD Flick. Not terribly intuitive. Had to find the guide and find where the different controls are located. Got it figured out but then making a couple of dvds took forever. It is woefully slow. But my main complaint is that the sound is out of sync on the authored dvds. Not acceptable.
DVDStyler has a new version V.3. Its still beta as of me writing this, but, it's really good! It also (at this time) has no crapware in the binaries. Its really fast, has lots of easy to use settings. Its even fast on this old heap with 2GB ram and a cpu made in the stone age. I stopped using it due to bad payload and slow, slow, slow. Now its almost perfect. VSO is the benchmark, and, this ain't far off! Well worth a look.
Thanks. I tried it. Building the interface was pretty straightforward. Choose a background, add buttons and tell it which start which video clips and burn.
But then I tried the DVD in a player and it gave me the menu but none of the buttons where active.
Ah - later discovered the remote wasn't working correctly. It works fine.
DVD Flick will do a decent job for most users......eventually! The only (major) drawback I have found is its speed, it is very, very slow, but if you can put up with the lack of speed, it is as good as any free authoring/ burning software
DVDStyler is a great program, the learning curve is fairly low. It's being updated (Current Ver. 2.9.3) just the other day in fact. It's way better than dvdflick. I'm using DVDStyler 64bit ver. 2.9.3 on Windows 7 Home 64-bit. I haven't seen any problems yet.
You can create a really professional looking custom menus in a few minutes, with it's drag and drop, WYSIWYG interface and the included backgrounds and buttons. Plus you can use your own custom made backgrounds and buttons . Creating a new custom button was surprising easy, You just need a program like "Inkscape" which can save as a .svg file and a Texteditor to copy and paste a few lines of code that are posted. There are actually two different kinds of buttons the normal ones and one I called a frame button which can show a movie clip in it.
Documentation could be better, it's lagging behind the current version number. (plus it doesn't tell you how to create the custom buttons, I found some online tutorials for that (in fact I just wrote and posted one on how to make the frame buttons on the sourceforge discussion page.). A lot of the information posted online is for older versions though, but is still useful. The sourceforge discussion forum doesn't have much traffic either.
As for the warnings about added crapware, I haven't seen any in the newest version installer. I think it might depend on where you download it from or if it is a older version. I downloaded the latest from the authors site dvdstyler .org which downloads from sourceforge.
Now I haven't tried burning a dvd using the built in burner, I create a ISO image first and mount it as a virtual drive ( I use PortableWinCDEmu-4.0 to mount the ISO), to play it first and check that everything works right before burning.
Then I use imgburn to burn the actual disk, this was a great tip I saw, you just about eliminate burning a coaster.
I think it's worth noting that a fork DVD Flick has been made by new developer and includes many fixes and updates. The original developer seems to have abandoned it. Info: http://sourceforge.net/projects/dvdflick-v2/ and here http://www.videohelp.com/tools/DVD-Flick.
You do not need to review DVD Author Plus as it seems that it is payware now.
Also, in this category, STAY AWAY from Sothinks Free DVD tool as it (the free version) will put an ad after EVERY chapter stating the DVD was authored using it.
Appears only their PAY version is worth anything.
NOTE:
To the site editor, according to the info at the site linked for DeVeDe the Windows version is NO LONGER SUPPORTED or UPDATED.
So, you may want to remove it from list.
See:
http://www.majorsilence.com/devede
DVDFlick has a problem when creating a DVD in NTSC from a PAL source. It gets the picture and audio well out of sync; not just by seconds but by minutes. Other drawbacks are that it won't create chapters and is VERY slow. DVDStyler is far superior, more versatile, and much faster and more dependable. DVDStyler is better than some programs of only a few years ago that cost $30 and upwards.
DVDStyler is excellent. Unfortunately once I switched to Windows 7 Home 64-bit it no longer produces NTSC discs. Even when all the settings say NTSC, all I get is PAL. So now I use DVDStyler only for the occasional DVD I make for friends in Europe.
I had the same problem with DVDFlick, where everything was out of sync. I fixed it by dialing the burn speed way, way down. I also stopped burning directly to disc, but now manually start IMGBurn to burn the files after I check if they're in sync. Again, I had to set the burn speed very low in IMGBurn too, or everything went out of sync.
This week I was unable to open DVDFlick at all. I got an error message 429, saying I don't have the "appropriate license to use this functionality". When I looked it up it appeared that the latest Windows update made some changes that are interfering with the program. I had rolled back to version 1.3.0.6, because of a similar problem, if I remember correctly. I downloaded the latest version 1.3.0.7 and now it works again. Weird. Some people seem to have managed to work around this issue by opening DVDFlick as an administrator.
Another issue that some people might encounter is that DVDFlick will do one project, but if you edit the project and try to do it again, you'll get error 53 "file not found" at the authoring stage of the process. Apparently DVD Flick retains some records of the previous run, which interfere with subsequent ones. Those records need to be deleted from the following folder (this is the path on Windows 7 Home, and might be slightly different in other versions) C:\Users\[user name]\AppData\Roaming\DVD Flick
There'll be about four files in that folder. Delete them all (but don't delete the folder itself). It's a hidden folder, so you'll first have to make it visible (in Windows Explorer: Tools > Folder options... > View > Show hidden files, folders, and drives).
I installed DVD Flick 1.3.0.7 build 738 and it worked one time. Now I get an error while I try to open it. 'number 339: Component 'com232.ocx' or one of its dependencies not correctly registered: a file is missing or invalid Last DLL error:0
I have uninstalled it cleaned my registry and reinstalled it and still get the same error. Running Windows 7 Ultimate, 64bit, AMD x2 RM-72.
ANY IDEAS????
Flick works fine on my desktop Win 7 Home, AMMD, 64bit but I found that if I open it as ADM on the laptop it works fine,no error. As long as it works I am happy.