Thursday, September 06, 2012

I needed to turn an audition clip file into a DVD that a funder could throw into a DVD player and see the movie on their TV.

I wound up using iDVD. It's meant to be a super simple program for putting your home movies on a disc. But if you actually want to do something really simple, it's not that intuitive.

What I wanted to do was make a DVD that plays one movie file once, without a menu. I could not figure out how to skip having a menu. You can put a movie before the menu. But the menus all seemed to require a minimum of two movies after. So I had to put the movie (an audition clip) before the menu, then twice after the menu.

It worked, but it was ugly. Also, the menus themselves, in their efforts to look "professional," came off as cheesy.

Eventually, I was able to download 1.6GB of other menu options, some which only demand one video after the menu, and don't look as cheesy.

So now: hey, I can make my own DVDs now!

Labels: distribution technology

12:04 PM

6 Comments:

If you're on a Mac, just start an iMovie project and drag the mp4 onto the timeline, then create a DVD from there.

Should be able to do the same with Windows Movie Maker.

By  John Parker, at 12:18 PM  

You're on a Mac, right? If it's one of the older versions, there's always iDVD. If not, the only one I can think of, off the top of my head, is Roxio's Toast?

By  Anonymous, at 12:28 PM  

iDVD works, but it is infuriating. To get a DVD that plays a movie on insertion, you have to put the movie in, and then have a menu, and then at least two other movies (or put the same movie in twice more).

Then you have to remember to kill the horrible menu music.

You shouldn't need a fancy authoring program in order to do the simplest thing.

By  Alex Epstein, at 4:21 PM  

Roxio's Toast is the one I've used, in the past. It gives you the option to have a menu or not.

By  Tim W., at 11:20 AM  

Found this on a forum, don't know if it still applies:

"You can do this in the normal iDVD app, simply choose 'OneStep DVD from Movie' in the File menu and select your file. It won't have any menu, and will play as a single movie from start to finish, looping until it’s stopped or ejected."

forum post link

By  deanareeno, at 11:25 AM  

For anyone not on a Mac, there's the Freemake Video Converter (www.freemake.com). It's true freeware with a very simple interface. Choosing DVD output with 'no menu' gives you a disc that just pops in and plays.

By  Stephen Gallagher, at 7:31 AM  

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