Chapter 1

172 Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About DVD
For transferring photos, or for making a customized DVD with menus,
chapters, and other fun stuff, you’ll need the following:
• A computer
• A DVD recordable drive ($200 to $600, or it might come with the
computer)
• DVD authoring software (usually comes with the drive or computer, or
you can buy it for $40 to $27,000, see “What DVD Authoring Systems
Are Available?”)
NOTE: You must use authoring software. You can’t just put MPEG
or AVI files on a disc and expect it to play in DVD players.
Then take the following steps
• If the video and pictures are not already in digital form (AVI, WMV, DivX,
QuickTime, JPEG, and so on) you need to transfer them to your
computer. For analog video, such as VHS and Hi8, you need a video
capture device or a computer with built-in analog video input; for digital
video such as DV or D8 you need a 1394/FireWire input on the
computer. For film, first have it transferred to tape or digital video at a
camera shop or video company. For slides or photos, use a scanner
(or rent scanning time at a place such as Kinkos).
• Import the video and audio clips into the DVD-Video authoring program.
Many DVD authoring programs will convert and encode the
video and audio for you. If not, you have to
• Encode the video into MPEG-2 (make sure the display frame rate is
set to 29.97 for NTSC or 25 for PAL).
• Encode the audio into Dolby Digital (or, if your video is short enough
that you have room on the disc, format the audio as 48 kHz PCM).
You can also use MPEG Level 2 audio, but it won’t work on all
players.
• Create some chapter points in your video tracks or let the DVD recording
software do it for you.
• To put photos on the disc, use the slideshow feature in the authoring
software or make each picture a menu. Most DVD authoring software
will directly read TIFF, JPEG, BMP, and Photoshop files.
• Create menus that link to your video clips and slideshows.
• Write your finished gem out to a recordable DVD ($2-$15). (But see “Is
It True There Are Compatibility Problems with Recordable DVD Formats?”
in Chapter 4 for compatibility worries.)