Make A DVD Menu - Free And Simple

With the free software DVD Flick you can easily make a DVD menu and a well working DVD.

Very convenient to bundle different episodes of your favorite series, to make a compilation of best YouTube movies or to simply combine different home videos.

The great thing about DVD Flick is, besides the fact that it’s free, is that the software is also very simple to use. It accept most common used video file formats, no complicated settings, and besides burning a DVD, you can also create an iso-file to play in your media center.

To start, download DVD Flick by clicking here. For this tutorial I will use version 1.3.0.7.

Install the software and start the program. First at the bottom of the screen, where you see “Project destination folder” (Picture 1A) , select the folder where you want to save your project on your hard disc. You can use the “Browse” button to navigate to the right location.

Settings

On top, in the menu, click on “Project settings” (Picture 1B) to modify the project settings. On the “General” tab (Picture 1C) you fill in the title of the DVD next to “Title” and next to “Target size” select the kind of DVD you are going to use. The size of your DVDs is normally mentioned on the box and often on the DVDs as well.

At “Encoder” you select “Normal” if you want to continue working on your computer whilst burning the DVD. If you do not need to continue to work, select “Above normal”.

Next, click on the “Video” tab and select your target format, PAL or NTSC. If you are not sure what the standard is in your country, click here for an overview. Than change the “Encoding” option to “Best”. This will make the encoding process slower but the quality will be better.

For the audio settings, click on the “Audio” tab. Here you can select the audio channels, mono, stereo or surround, if you are not sure, select “Auto”. Leave the “Bitrate” on “Auto” as well.

On the “Playback” tab, you can choose what has to be done after a clip is finished playing. You can choose to go back to the menu, play the clip again, go to the next clip or stop the DVD.

Finally, on the “Burning” tab, decide if you want to make a DVD or iso-file. Writing speed x4 will make sure the disc is burned without faults.

Time to click “Accept” now, you can always change these settings later on.

Adding Video Clips

At the right side of DVD Flick, you will find the buttons to add videos, remove videos or edit videos (Picture 2A).

Click on  “Add title” to select the video clips you would like to burn on your DVD. If you use videos with separate subtitle files, it is a good idea to give them the exact same name as your video clips. DVD Flick will then recognize them automatically, so you don’t have to select them all separately.

Besides the name of the video file, you can also see the duration of the clip, if there is sound included or not and how many subtitle files there are used (Picture 2B). To change the order of the video clips, you can click on the buttons 3Move up” and “Move down” at the right (Picture 2C).

At the left side of DVD Flick, the yellow bar will show how much space your videos take on your DVD (Picture 2D).

Edit Video Clips

By clicking on “Edit title” (Picture 2A), you can modify a few settings from the video clip.

A new window will open and first it will show the “General” tab. Next to “Name” you can change the name of a video clip (Picture 3A). This name will show in the DVD menu.

To get the right aspect ratio in your screen, you can select “Normal” or “Widescreen”.

In the selection menu of the DVD, clips will be shown as thumbnails. Which picture will show in the thumbnail is up to you to decide. You can jump to a specific time at “Thumbnail time index” (Picture 3C).

If you have several audio tracks for your video clip, maybe different languages, you can add them in the “Audio tracks” tab. DVD Flick will automatically arrange it so that there will be a possibility in the menu to select the desired language.

Make a DVD Menu

The DVD menus in DVD Flick are very standard and don’t look too fantastic at all. You can surf to the DVD Flick forum, click on Help and Support, then click on “Your own menu templates go here” to download some zip files with new menus.

Copy these files into the “Templates” folder in the DVD Flick installation folder in the “Program Files” to be able to access them in the program.

In DVD Flick, click on “Menu settings” to create and modify your menu settings.

First select the menu you would like to use (Picture 4A). If you don’t want a menu, choose “none” (Picture 4B).

When you have chosen a menu, you will have to choose if you want the menu to start automatically by checking the “Autoplay” function (Picture 4c).

Besides that you can also choose to show the options for selecting the subtitles or language tracks. If you want that, you can place a check at “Show subtitle menu first” and Show audio menu first”.

Click on “Preview” to see a preview of your DVD menu (Picture 4D).

Both the main menu  as the sub menu contain English words that you can not change in DVD Flick. In order to use words in other languages, you must open the template.cfg  file that is found in the folder of the corresponding template file.

Open the file with Notepad. Press CRTL + F to open the search and type “Text = ” and then click “Find Next” to find the first reference (Text =” Audio tracks “) where to find English words. Change Audio Tracks in Audio Selection or whatever you want, and then click Find Next to the second reference (Text = “Resume”) Repeat this step until you have replaced all the English words.

If you want to change the background color in maybe the mosaic template for instance, you can search in the same template.cfg file for background_blue.bmp and you can change blue in green or red to get a different background color.

After you have changed everything you wanted, save the template.cfg file and see the result by clicking on “Preview” again in the menu settings”

Burn Your DVD And ISO-File

Now your DVD with fancy DVD menu is ready to be burned. In the “Project settings” you can mark the option to make an iso-file as well. After that, click on “Create DVD” in the top menu and DVD Flick will start to render your videos. This may take a few minutes or a couple of hours, depending on the total length of your video clips. (Don’t forget to insert an empty DVD in your disc drive 😉 )

I hope this works out for you. If you have any more questions regarding this program, don’t hesitate to contact me.

Please leave your thoughts on this one!

Burn a Video to DVD with DVD Menu