HomeMake your own DVDs and Windows Media Encoder
I’ve just finished writing a guide for DVD Flick. DVD Flick is a really easy to use tool, especially for making DVDs from your DivX/XviD files (TV episode downloads anyone?). Best of all, it’s free.
It won’t create DVDs with beautiful menus and other fancy features, but things like multiple audio tracks and subtitles are not too difficult to add in. The output quality is quite good as well, although this largely depends on the quality of the source file. Give it a try and I think you’ll be impressed.
The other guide I wrote is about AVI to WMV conversion, trying to make these files playable on the Xbox 360. I used the free Windows Media Encoder 9 software, which unlike DVD Flick, is not as straight forward or well designed. It will work well when the input file is “Microsoft approved” (ie. WMV files), but for anything else (like DivX/XviD), it can cause a lot of problems. The software itself is quite powerful, with support for a lot of different types of encodings, including streaming and VC-1, but you can just feel that it wasn’t really designed for use by your average/newbie user (which is no surprise then that the URL for the software on Microsoft’s website has changed to add “forpros” in the URL), unlike DVD Flick.