Convert videos to instantly playing DVDs or ISO images, with DVD Author Plus


DVD Author Plus is a free CD / DVD Burning program that will let you create backups of your data, store movies, pictures and audio files. Unfortunately the program does not support the mkv format, but it will convert an avi (or wmv, mov, mpeg) movie into a DVD player-ready format.

DVD Author Plus writes DVD video discs that are compatible with most standard DVD players and also with a Windows PC. Once the disc is inserted into a player, the video starts instantly without the need to click through DVD menus. DVD Author Plus features an explorer-style interface to let you select files for burning. You can also easily create instant copies of existing CDs and DVDs even if you have only one drive. If you don’t want to burn a disc, the program will let you create ISO images of any DVD or CD.

Features: Create DVD Video discs that instantly play * Read and convert most common video formats to DVD * Create PAL (Europe) and NTSC (North America) formats * Supports 4:3 (standard) and 16:9 (widescreen) aspect ratio * Select from different video quality and audio encoding formats * Burn audio, video, or any file type to Data discs * Duplicate CD / DVDs * Create Multi-session discs * Copy and erase discs instantly * Backup any CD / DVD as ISO image file * Create CDs and DVDs from existing ISO image files * Import ISO sessions and edit existing file structure on disc * Supports CD-R, CD-RW, DVD-R, DVD+R, DVD-RW, DVD+RW, DVD-RAM * Support for DVD-R Dual Layer format and DVD+R Double Layer * Use both internal and external CD / DVD writers * Burn discs in the background, while continuing to work with other programs * Automatically verify data after burning

DVD Author Plus makes use of multi-core processors (as I can guess from the temperature increase). On a Quad Core system DVD Author Plus needed 142 minutes to convert into a DVD ISO image a movie of 128 minutes – but in very high quality, that resulted to an 8.37 GB iso image file. I guess that in normal quality the whole procedure would be much faster.

DVD Author Plus will not let you incorporate into your movie any external subtitles. Another problem regarding video conversion is that the program does not explain the meaning of “High Quality”, “Good Quality” etc in terms of GB. DVD Author Plus does not offer buffer underrun protection, but it will verify data after burning.