Page 1 of 5: Introduction
TMPGEnc DVD Author (TDA) has just been upgraded to version 3, and for me, it is one of the best DVD authoring tools for home users, because of its simplicity, and at the same time, advanced features. This guide will show you how to take your video files and turn them into a DVD, complete with menus, chapters and other advanced features.
This guide is aimed at users who are fairly new to DVD authoring, but is already fairly comfortable with things like video conversion and editing and know about basic DVD structures like Titles and Chapters. Please note that TDA allows you to make picture slideshows, and even DivX menus, but this guide only covers authoring DVDs from video files (guides for picture slideshows and DivX menus coming soon). You can read the DivX version of this guide in our TMPGEnc DVD Author 3 DivX Authoring Guide. Read our DVD Authoring Tools Roundup to find out which DVD authoring tool is best for your needs.
A guide on how to use the previous version (version 2.0) of TMPGEnc DVD Author can be found here. You can also use Nero Vision 4 to author your DVDs much in the same way as TDA, but there are quite a few missing features in Nero Vision - the ability to encode 16:9 DVDs, and it's habit of always re-encoding the video (without re-encoding, a DVD can be made in 30 minutes or less - with re-encoding, it can take 3 or more hours), even if it is already in the right format.
Software you'll need: