• Basics
• Advanced Tips

The Basics

1. Get your vids into MPEG-2 format.
2. Import the MPEG-2 files into DVD authoring software, lay them out, add menus.
3. Burn the authored DVD onto a DVD-R disk with a DVD-R burner.

• Format versus media.
  A DVD-R disk is just a type of computer disk that works with inexpensive home DVD burner drives. They can hold 4.7 GB of data. This data does not have to be video, it can be anything.

  A DVD video disk has very specific requirements for the format, both of the actual video and audio files, and the way the files are burned onto the disk. If you don't meet the format requirements, the disk will not play in a standard DVD player.

• Video formats
  There are many different kinds of video formats. (This is not quite the same as codecs, if you've heard that term, but it's close enough for basic work.) Some examples include: Windows Media Player (.wmv), Quicktime (.mov), RealVideo (.rm or .ram), MPEG-1 (.mpg), MPEG-2 (.m2v or .mpg), MPEG-4 (.mpg), DivX AVI (.avi), DV AVI (.avi), other AVI (.avi), etc.

  DVD video must be in the MPEG-2 video format.

• MPEG-2 video
  MPEG-2 video is a format that produces very high-quality files with reasonably good compression. It's not as good as MPEG-4, which is a more recent format, but it's the one that was accepted as a general standard by manufacturers, so it'll be with us for a while.

  You have to get your video into MPEG-2 format in order to put it onto a DVD. To do this, you have to get an MPEG-2 encoder. Because MPEG-2 is a commercial video format, you will have to pay for any piece of software that does MPEG-2 encoding. Most commercial video editing tools include MPEG-2 encoding now, and TMPGEnc (www.tmpgenc.com) includes a 30-day trial of MPEG-2 encoding and is inexpensive if you want to purchase.

• Basic settings for MPEG-2 encoding
  There are many different possible settings to use in MPEG-2 encoding, and going into detail is way more time than I'm willing to spend. Look online, there are many useful guides. The most important basic ones are:
  • bitrate: stick with 5300 kbps and only increase it if you get a poor quality file with pixelation. Never go above 8000 kbps. It's not going to get better from there and many players will actually have stuttering with higher bitrate files.
  • constant vs. variable: use variable bitrate if your encoding tool supports it. It saves space by not using the max bitrate for parts of your video that don't need it, like black screens.
  • multiplexing: this refers to mixing together the video and audio. Turn this off. If you multiplex, you will get a single ".mpg" file. This is fine for playing on computer, but for actually authoring a DVD, you will have a much easier time of it if you have separate video and audio files. The video file will have an ".m2v" suffix.
  • audio: the audio MUST be in 48000 kHz frequency. If it's not, the DVD won't work. This trips up a lot of people because when you rip audio from a CD, it is in 44100 kHz frequency.

    If you turn off multiplexing, then most encoding tools will either make an uncompressed .wav or .aiff file, or a compressed .mp2 or .ac3 file. If you have a choice, AC3 format is best. MP2 is worse quality audio, and wav/aiff are huge files.

    If you're making an AC3 file, 192 kbps or 256 kbps is fine for the audio bitrate.

• DVD authoring
  Once you have MPEG-2 video files and 48000 kHz audio files in either WAV/AIFF or AC3/MP2 format, you are then ready to actually author a DVD. You will need a different piece of software for this. Most DVD-R drives now come with at least some primitive kind of software, or you can get the inexpensive and nice DVD-lab software ($79 currently, but see note below), or really pricey pro software like Scenarist. For Mac, there's DVD Studio Pro.

  Basically, you will import your video and audio files into the authoring program as "assets". (At this point, the better authoring programs will tell you if there's something wrong with the format of your video or audio.) Then you will make one "title" or "track" for each vid, and insert the matching audio and video files for the vid into the title. Then you can also make menus that point to the different titles.

  The details depend entirely on the specific software, so you'll have to consult the help file for your software.

Advanced Tips

• Note on DVD-lab
  DVD-lab currently has a bug where if you use WAV files instead of AC3, then the disk will play at double-speed on *some* older DVD players, . If you're just making DVDs for your own personal use, this is not a big deal as long as they work on your player (which you can just try out), but if you're planning to distribute, you'll want to get your hands on an AC3 encoder.

• Titles/Tracks vs. Chapters
  DVDs are designed for one big honking piece of video (the title) with lots of chapter marks inside them. When you're making a DVD of vids, you instead have a bunch of separate small pieces of video (separate titles) with no chapter marks inside them. (Titles are also called tracks in some software.) Some DVD players will not handle this very intuitively. Some things to do in order to help make them compatible:
  • Add your vids to the disk in the same order in which you want them to play, so that "Title 1" is the vid you want to play first, "Title 2" is the vid you want to play second, etc.
  • If you want to add a vid into the middle, (brace yourself), delete all the tracks you added up to that one, then re-add them afterwards. Yes, a huge pain. Yes, the only way to make this work reliably.
  • Add a single chapter point to every vid at the very end. This deals with some old DVD players where using the "next chapter" button on the remote will not actually work to skip to the next title if there is no chapter.