Throughout history, humans have tried many methods to preserve precious fragments of the past; from passing on tales, carving symbols, building monuments, drawing paintings, printing photos, up to the latest method of saving digital files to hard drives and optical disks.
And DVD is the most commonly used media by people nowadays to store their multimedia digital memories.
So it can be a collection of funny videos downloaded from YouTube or your vacation videos. If you want to watch them on the big television screen and not your computer.
While you may have devices or gadgets at your disposal to do that effortlessly, for instance by streaming the videos, you sometimes may need to burn them to DVD to do just that.
Related: 10 Best Free DVD/CD Burning Software
Here again it depends on the DVD player that you use. Maybe all you need to do is burn the video files as they are on a DVD to play them on your television. More often than not though, you need to burn them into video DVD format so that the videos are recognized properly by the DVD player.
DVD Author Plus is a free alternative that I have been working with for the last couple of days. It is an all in one program that can not only author the DVDs but also burn them to disc once the authoring is finished.
Compile All Your Favorite Videos into a Movie DVD
The process itself is straightforward and consists of two steps.
- You can use the built-in file browser or drag and drop to select video files that you want to create a movie DVD of.
- The program displays the capacity of the selected files on disc, and depending on that, you may need to change the video quality in the authoring menu, or switch from a single-layer to a dual-layer DVD.
- Once that is done, you simply click on the next button to display the second step of the process.
- Here you select the dvd recorder that you want to use and a speed for the recording job. All that is left now is to pop in a blank disc into the recorder and lean back once you have made the selection as everything else is handled by DVD Author Plus from this point in time forward.
It takes roughly 45 minutes to convert 90 minutes of video.
DVD Author Plus supports many popular video formats including Avi, Mpeg-4, Divx, Mov, Wmv or Vob but unfortunately not formats such as mkv or ogm.