FickleGeek

So today my buddy was screaming and ranting about his latest project to create a DVD. You know, taking video he’d recorded with his new DV cam, and making a disk that will actually play in a real DVD player hooked up to a TV. And he wanted to do it on his WinXP laptop (a nice gaming-class Toshiba), and NOT the Mac he uses at work.

He had a ginormous amount of video he’d saved from his camera to the PC, but no software to wrap it all up into a nice pretty shiny plastic platter. Being the Freeware nut I am, I did some quick searching and came up with a couple of pretty good alternatives for him to try: DVDFlick and DVDStyler. He decided to go with DVDFlick for now, and successfully burned his first DVD after mind-numbing hours of encoding and churning. Besides his success story, there were several sites out there talking about these apps. Good to know that this is no longer an area pretty much restricted to commercial products!

Of course, now he wants a solution to archive his 76GB of original video material, but apparently he’s not ready to shell out for a 2TB NAS … yet.