Posted 11/19/08 at 04:30:08 PM by Alex Castle

Although DVDs are quickly losing the limelight to their higher-definition Blu-Ray brethren, they’ve still got a lot going for them. They’re cheap, for one, as are DVD burners. And DVD players and drives are so ubiquitous that you know that if you burn data onto a DVD, you’ll be able to access it almost anywhere.

Plus, burning data onto a DVD is easy—there’re a dozen free programs that can do it for you without any hassle. But burning video to a disc so that you can watch it in a regular DVD player isn’t nearly so simple. If you’re willing to pony up for commercial DVD authoring software like Nero Vision, the process is pretty user-friendly, but here at Maximum PC we’re committed to showing you how to do things using free software solutions, so we’re going to explain how you can use a free and powerful (albeit slightly confusing) program called AVI2DVD to create full-featured video DVDs from your media files.

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Posted 03/18/08 at 11:50:00 AM by Katherine Stevenson

By now, anyone who knows their way around an optical disc drive knows the names Roxio and Nero. The two media-creation mavens have been on the scene since practically the dawn of CD-burning time. And through to today, inclusion of one or the other’s software is de rigueur with the purchase of just about any retail PC or optical drive. Of course, the bundled software packages are but abbreviated versions of the full-on suites Roxio and Nero offer. The stand-alone packages go far beyond the basics of disc copying, burning, and playing—and that’s never been more true than today.

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