The DVD authoring software market is so sparse that you can count all of them on your finger tips. Most of these are commercial programs and only a couple of them are freeware. Among the freeware, DVD Flick is worth mentioning. Another one which has a decent set of features is AVStoDVD.
AVStoDVD is a flexible tool to convert various media formats to DVD compliant streams and burn them into a highly compatible multi tracks DVD. AVStoDVD is actually a package of different open source programs which are bundled together seamlessly into one application and under one graphical interface. AVStoDVD uses:
- AviSynth for video and audio editing
- QuEnc/HCenc/ReJig/FFmpeg for video encoding
- QuEnc/FFmpeg/Aften/Wavi for audio encoding
- SubtitlesCreator for subtitles encoding
- MuxMan/BatchMux for DVD authoring
- ImgBurn for ISO Image Building and DVD Burning
The combination of these various tools make AVStoDVD a powerful DVD authoring software.
The Good:
- Supports a wide range of video formats, even flash videos (FLV), mobile videos (3GP, 3G2), DIVX, MKV, Real media files and QuickTime files.
- Supports 3 subtitle formats – SRT, SUB, SST
- Users can customize the size of the DVD . You can either choose the standard DVD-5 or DVD-9, or enter your own size in Megabytes.
- Automatically calculates the best bit rate needed, which you can override with your custom bitrates.
- Supports both Constant Bit rate and Variable Bit rate 2-pass encoding
- Normalizes audio during encoding
- Can execute AviSynth script
- Automatically creates chapters at set intervals
- Advanced menu creation wizard allows complete customization of DVD menu. You can add custom background image, add video as background, create your own buttons, adjust size of thumbnails, drop-shadows etc.
- Output can be in the form of DVD folder structure, ISO file, muxed MPEG2 file or directly burned into a DVD using ImgBurn.
- Preview video before encoding.
- Encoding can be paused in the middle. This is very useful if you urgently need to run some other CPU intensive programs. You can probably even Hibernate your computer once you pause it, although I haven’t tested it.
The Bad
- Cannot customize subtitle settings like font, color and size. These has to be preconfigured using software such as Subtitle Workshop.
- A little slow in encoding.
Have just started using AVStoDVD. Thanks for clarifying all the advantages of this programme!
Thank you so much! This helped me so much! I had a conference where one video on someone else's DVD recorded didn't get finalized, and now I can post it! This is very useful dvd authoring software.