How to Turn Any Digital Movie File into a DVD Disc for Free!

Have you ever wanted to take an avi or mpeg movie and make a real DVD disc out of it? Well, now you can!

Since at least 2001, there have been commercial products out on the market which claimed to produce video CDs and DVDs for you (programs such as from Muvee Autoproducer). While they seemed like great eye candy, they were rather bulky and but they always seemed to crash on me back then. I recently had a need to produce video onto dvds using XP, and decided to revisit the topic and share with you how I do this without spending a penny.

Many of you may have found other shareware programs such as ConvertXtoDVD to do the job for you. Those programs work, and some like ConvertXtoDVD work well and have a few eye-candy additions. But unfortunately they are shareware - meaning you can only use them for a short period of time as a trial, and even while you do use it in trial-mode, programs such as ConvertXtoDVD will place an unsightly logo over the frames of your video until you do buy the program.

Fortunately, you don't have to worry about that anymore.

DVD Flick is a freeware DVD authoring tool alternative that lets you create your own menus, subtitles, audio, and more. It automatically converts your digital movie files (avi, mpeg, mp4, etc) into the proper format for DVD discs, and then burns the movie files you load onto it in exactly the order you specify. It supports over 45 file formats, 60 video codecs (including XVid), and 40 audio codecs. And once again, it is completely 100% free - no spyware, no adware, no watermarks, and no other limitations.

Requirements for using it:

A Pentium III processor with MMX or equivalent AMD processor, and 256 MB of RAM.

Note: If you have a Pentium 4 processor and your computer is a couple of years old, you should be just fine. On most computers since 2005, you should be fine on the ram. Even if you only have 512mb of RAM on your computer this program still has enough to run properly.

You can download and install the 13MB setup program from here:

http://www.dvd-flick.net/download.php

Once you've downloaded and installed the program, running it is fairly easy. When you run the program for the first time, you'll be greeted by a box that gives you a couple of options. The box will let you read a guide to get started with DVD flick, visit the forum for DVD flick, or visit the official web site above. If you're eager to get started, just click the Close button to start using the program.

At the top of the screen, click on the icon that says "New Project".

Next, on the right-hand side of the screen, select the button that says "+Add Title". You'll be given a dialog box where you can select a video file to add to the compilation.

Once you've added a few movie files to your project, you can use the "Move Up" and "Move Down" buttons on the right-hand side to position movies the order you want them to appear on your compilation. On the left, there is a large grey bar which will tell you how much space (in a percentage) you have left on a disc that you can add. On the lower right, you will see a summary of how many minutes your current project will play on a disc, and also how much hard drive space is required for you to make your DVD.

You can always use the "Remove Title" button to remove a file from your project if you decide that you want to put something else on the disc in place of another movie. Doing this will NOT remove it from your hard drive, of course, but just from the project list.

If you would like to create a fancy menu, then you can click the "Menu Settings" button and work with it. Most of the options on there should be self-explanatory.

Are you ready to create your DVD? Yes? Great! Make sure that you have a blank DVD in your dvd burner drive, and then click the "Create Dvd" button at the top of the program.

The process to encode the audio and video for your DVD begins. You can wait and watch it encode the movie files, OR you can play a game of tetris, which is actually built-in to the encoder program! How cool is that? (Press the "Entertain Me" button to play Tetris, and the "Exit" button on the Tetris screen to return to the encoder box).

When it's done with that, it will begin burning your DVD disc. When it is finished, you can have it "do nothing" (it just waits for you to close the program), restart the computer, shut down the computer, or hibernate.

That's all there is to it! Pop the finished DVD into any dvd player, and enjoy your video disc!