Recommendations for a DVD authoring program please

[psteel]

Hi,

I am looking for recommendations for a DVD authoring program.
I want to be able to
Assign pictures to the buttons, possibly place them where I want
Place title text where I want
Create sub menus
Have background music in the various menus if possible
Be able to encode AVI (which is what I have to edit at present). If someone can recommend a program to edit mpegs all the better).
Possible create my own templates.?
Not too expensive.

Have had a look at a few, and they all seem to have some good features individually.

Eg Vista DVD maker has a nice touch of taking stills from the videos and moving them around as pictures on the root menu, yet can the video can stop on a frame whilst the sound keeps going.?

TIA

[Supreme2k]

look to the left, click on Tools, then select Authoring.

[lordsmurf]

Don't let authorware encode for you, that's a mistake.

Aside from that, use Ulead DVD Workshop 2. You can probably find a copy pretty cheap these days.

DVDWS will encode for you, but it will never look as good as separate encoding. That's true for all authorware.

[psteel]

Don't let authorware encode for you, that's a mistake.

Could you explain a little more please, how would you encode from AVI to VOB.?

Aside from that, use Ulead DVD Workshop 2. You can probably find a copy pretty cheap these days.

DVDWS will encode for you, but it will never look as good as separate encoding. That's true for all authorware.

I'll check that out as you both mention it.

Thank you.

[Alex_ander]

Try TMPGEnc Authoring Works 4. It does what you want, incl. saving current menu as a new template.

[lordsmurf]

AVI is a wrapper, not a video format.
VOB is a DVD-Video wrapper, also not a video format.

If I had HuffYUV (AVI) for example, I would use TMPGEnc Plus, MainConcept Reference, MainConcept Encoder, or maybe even Procoder (old versions), and convert to DVD-Video compliant MPEG-2 video files.

If I wanted an all-in-one, I'd go for ConvertXToDVD.

[michcio]

I always use Avisynth + HCEnc to convert my .avi to mpeg and then use GUI for dvdauthor to author my DVD's it does everything you describe! (Except the avi->mpeg encoding)

[yoda313]

If you must have encoding and authoring in one program you might look into Tmpengc Dvd Author 4 (I think 4 is the latest tda verion - if not check out 3 - I am still using 2.0 so I don't know the latest release number).

I do know it should have divx authoring and encoding to dvd from divx.

[ZQX]

A free option is DVDStyler which will convert your avi as well as allow a lot of customization of your menu design.

[psteel]

Thank you all for the tips and replies. I will check each of these out.
There are so many programs out there and all purport to do things easily.

I have Xilisoft DVD ripper and so thought I'd have a look at their DVD authoring program, but the buttons overwrite the title if too large, as well as being immovable, so not impressed with that program.

Now I have a few to work with.

Thanks again for all the replies.

[jknutson2]

It's been a while since I last looked here and I see that not much has changed. At the time, I was looking at using DVD-Lab Studio for DVD authoring. I'm about to try Premiere Elements.

Anyway, looking at the tools section and the comments, it's not clear how much of the tools list is current. Many of the comments are old (2007 or earlier). Looking at the DVD-Lab web site "Latest News" is March of 2008.

So what's the latest buzz on authoring software to use and how do we find out?

[ZQX]

The Tools list here is extremely-well maintained, I must say. Everything listed there is the most recent version. I am always referring to it to check newer versions of stuff I have.

The search for a good versatile/intuitive authoring tool has been a thorn in my side for ages. I can never seem to settle on one tool. That said, DVD Lab Pro is perhaps the bees-knees. GUIforDVDAuthor is a fabulously versatile thing (and free), but I have never been able to gel with it (one of these days I'll just force myself, I suppose). It hasn't been updated for a fair while, but I suspect it's still being worked on. DVD Styler is worth a look, it is updated fairly regularly and looks solid and efficient.

Personally, I'm not sure if there's anything else suitable (for me) out there. I'd like to try Ulead DVD Workshop but can't find it anywhere.

[niteghost]

AVI is a wrapper, not a video format.
VOB is a DVD-Video wrapper, also not a video format.

If I had HuffYUV (AVI) for example, I would use TMPGEnc Plus, MainConcept Reference, MainConcept Encoder, or maybe even Procoder (old versions), and convert to DVD-Video compliant MPEG-2 video files.

If I wanted an all-in-one, I'd go for ConvertXToDVD.

That is te best, I just learn how to use TDA, to assign each file to a "Button", using "Clip & edit chapters" feature in TDA.