Rip It, Mix It, Burn It. That used to be the Apple iPod ad slogan, until the record companies declared ripping illegal. Coincidentally, the iTunes Music Store also debuted around the time that slogan died, as it become against Apple's financial interest for customers to Rip music. 

Speaking of which, no one ever "mixes" any more. I had a friend in University that used to make killer mix tapes. For you younger kids, he would get some good songs and put them on a cassette tape that you could listen to in your car. With the advent of the iPod, and MP3 players in general, I now carry 1,000 songs around with me everywhere, and mix tapes are dead. I do miss them, because creating them was an art. Not to mention the actual art my friend used to hand-draw for the lining of the cassette holder.

The next evolution in home-rolled entertainment became SVCD. It was so easy to take an AVI or MPEG and burn it on a CD-ROM. Even old DVD players supported VideoCD format. The downside was CD's could only support 70-80 minutes of video content. So if your movie happened to run 90 minutes, as most movies do, you ended up having to split the movie over two CD's. It was a bit of a pain to have to get up and switch the CD in the middle of the movie, but programs such as TMPGEnc made it so easy to convert and split long movies. Burning SVCDs were easy.

I have always found burning actual DVD's hard. Extremely hard. First of all, the CD/DVD burning software that I have does not convert the movies from AVI format to the proper DVD format. You have always needed DVD Editing Software. I even tried some trial-versions of DVD editing software, like Pinnacle Studio, and even could not get 1% close to getting it to work. I was destined to not be able to burn a DVD playable in a DVD player.

But then I found Avi2Dvd. I have used this software before and could not get it to work. But I downloaded the lastest free beta, and have been burning DVD's like crazy for two days. Whatever the author changed, it works. It really really works.

Now the basic DVD Burning is fairly simple - load the AVI file, leave the default settings alone, and click Add Job and then Go. Easy. Not even 1-2-3. As easy as 1-2.

You can also author DVD menus, although I have not yet tried to. You know, that intro screen where you can either press play, or set some options, or view a chapter guide. You can make them. And it's all free.

Really amazing. If you have some videos on your PC (home or otherwise) and you want to turn them to a DVD, look no further. The quality has been amazing so far. No coasters, no audio-video sync problems. So far, perfect.

I may have just bought my last $5 movie... blank DVD's cost 25 cents a piece!