More and more video editing applications have jumped on the DVD authoring bandwagon - almost all budget video editing software offer the ability to create fully featured DVDs. One notable exception is the increasingly popular (and not to mention free) Windows Movie Maker. Fear not though, as you can continue the freeware trend by hunting down some excellent applications.

First we need to download and install the relevant applications. bbMPEG (author's homepage) is the first application to convert your DV-AVI file from Windows Movie Maker. Next is Ifoedit (author's hompage) to author the DVD.

Extract your downloaded bbMPEG package to C:\Program Files\bbMPEG. If you're using Windows XP, replace the enclosed bbmpeg.dll with this download. Now open up AVI2MPG2 (you might want to create a short cut on your desktop) and you'll be presented with the following screen:

First we need to add our DV-AVI file created in Windows Movie Maker. So click on Add (illustrated in the picture below) and browse to your saved AVI file:

Next we need to ensure the frame size is correct. For PAL DVD this should be 720 x 576 and for NTSC 720 x 640. Ideally, this should match the DV-AVI created in Windows Movie Maker! You can also change the name and location of your output file by clicking on MPEG filename:

We're now ready to encode! So all that's left to do is click start encoding. On the next screen, click settings. Click the video stream settings tab and then check the DVD radio button. Click on the advanced settings tab and change the video format to PAL if you're not from America :-) Click on OK and then Start...

Unfortunately we now need to seperate the audio and video (create elementary streeams) to input into Ifoedit. So download and install TMPGenc (I would have used this to create the MPEG files, but it has a 30 day limit on MPEG2 creation, so goes against the "freeware" bit of the title!). You can download TMPGenc from the site at http://www.tmpgenc.net/e_main.html

To demultiplex the audio and video, firstly install TMPGenc in the same manor as bbMPEG. Run TMPGenc and select File > MPEG tools from the menu to bring up the following:

Click the Simple De-multiplex tab, then click browse and locate the mpeg file created on bbMPEG, then finally click run and you'll save seperate audio and video streams.

Once it's done, upon up ifoedit (its just an executable):

Now browse to your video and audio files created in bbMPEG. The video file will be *.m2v and the audio *mp2. Select a destination folder.

Click on OK and all the necesary files are created! Now it's just a matter of burning the created files to a DVD...