Download: DVDStyler

DVDStyler is a useful program if you want to quickly produce DVD video discs that have several videos and a menu to choose between them. Even better, it doesn't cost a penny.

Read more: Video editing articles

Installation is simple and the Welcome wizard has all the options to make sure you end up with the right kind of disc. We were pleased to see that PAL was selected by default. Other options include whether or not to produce in widescreen and the size of the DVD disc you will be burning to.

There are some basic templates to get started with that cover the first menu on the disc and a secondary page for viewers to select titles.

As videos are dragged from the file browser to the bottom bar, they are automatically added to the menu page. This has the potential to be a big time saver. If you add more videos than can fit on the sub-menu another menu page is added for you.

A bar at the bottom of the DVDStyler window shows how much space has been used on the disc to reduce the chance of accidentally overrunning.

Projects can be saved in the DVDStyler file format to edit later.

One tool that we did miss is the ability to preview how the disc will work before burning.

It can import a wide variety of file formats including AVI, FLV, MOV, MP4, MPEG, OGG and WMV. If you are using MPEG or VPB files from an existing DVD project they can be burnt to disc without re-encoding, a big timesaver, especially on bigger projects. There is no requirement to stick with the same file format for all the videos on one disc either.

There is no obvious preview button but thankfully this tool is included in DVDStyler. Click on the Burn button and select the preview option. On our test computer the project then opened in Windows Media Player.

DVDStyler is available for other systems as well as Windows. Links for the Mac version and instructions for installing on Ubuntu and other versions of Linux can be found on the DVDStyler Download page.