Anybody Here Make DVDs?

ok i'm not real technical but what i'm looking for is advice if anybody knows how to make a DVD with menus and chapters and all that nice stuff from AVI videos. best thing would be one program (hehehe yeah right) and not a million different ones that all need a phd to figure out. also free programs are preferred. i know i'm not asking for much.

anybody know if this is possible or how to do this and want to share the knowledge? thanks in advance.

I don't know of any free programs, but I do know DVD-Lab is decent in price and very powerful while still functional to the new user. It comes with preset menu-templates you can use, and easy to follow help files to build your own.

Though if you're counting on authoring DVDs, you can't use .avi files. Only mpg2 and 4 with ac3 or uncompressed wav audio. It's a closed and set standard and is very annoying, I know. Not much you can do though except re-encode .avi files which degrades the quality tremendously.

thanks for the link. not wanting you to post a big tutorial but do you know anything about how to change an AVI into what works with DVDs or know where to find that out?

I've used Intervideo WinDVD Creator 2 software that came with the computer I bought in January. It's really easy to use. It's the only DVD creation software I've used, though, so I can't offer any comparisons.

Do a google for "Aurora Multimedia Workshop"

It's a good all-in-one program for file conversion and batch processesing (converting multiple files). Easy to use as well. Though I don't think it's cheap.

There are a bazillion free tools out there, but they're a fair bit more complicated to use.

Just remember that if you really wanna convert those avi's to mpg4, to make sure that the framerate is set to NTSC 29.97 and the aspect ratio is set 16:9 for widescreen and like 1:1 for full frame (I can't remember the aspect ratio for full-frame atm, but I'm sure you could look it up somewhere).

thanks for the help you two.