DV 101: A Hands-On Guide for Business, Government & Educators

Chapter 8. Producing DVDs

At a high level, DVDs have two components: content and menus. Content primarily takes the form of videos, slideshows, and audio files; while menus are the pages that allow the viewer to navigate to and play the content. From the same 50,000-foot view, DVD authoring comes down to two simple activities: creating the menus and linking the menus to the content so the desired video for example, plays when the viewer presses the button. Once you’ve linked your video content to a menu, the DVD authoring program does the rest—encoding the video into MPEG-2 format and recording menus and content to your DVD recorder.

Many consumer-oriented DVD authoring programs are just that simple—even a first-timer can create a DVD in about ...