It's mid-2015, and currently most videos are viewed online and often in high definition, so why would I write about DVD authoring applications when plastic media and standard definition videos are on the decline? Well, my daughter had a couple of recitals recently, and for the school where she attends kindergarten, I record the performances in every class and compile them in a recital DVD which the school sells as a fundraiser--something I've been doing for the past couple of years. DVDs work well for this purpose because parents who purchase a recital DVD receive a physical product, and they often buy multiple copies to give to their extended families. Furthermore, since the school manages the financial transactions (I volunteer my time and skills but never handle any of the money), distribution of DVDs is much simpler than implementing security controls for video distribution.
Over the years, I've used Apple's iDVD to create numerous DVDs for vacation videos and other home movies. For the most recent school recitals, I decided to compare iDVD with its main competitor, Roxio's Toast. The two aspects that I will compare are DVD menu authoring and DVD video encoding options.
Menu Authoring. As compared with online videos, one of the main features of a DVD is its ability to present a viewer with a menu from which the viewer can navigate to and select from multiple menu options. Therefore, one of them most important feature sets of DVD authoring applications is the ability to let the user customize the menus--this includes the main menu, submenus, and the "pre-menu" videos (e.g., the part of a commercial DVD where you might expect to see the copyright notice, trailers, production company logos, and any other "mandatory" content as viewers are generally unable to skip over this content--although there are workarounds that could be the topic of a separate blog post). For menu authoring, iDVD is far superior to Toast. While Toast offers some standard menu templates and lets you insert a picture as a background for your menus, and select colors for highlight, background and text, that's about where its features end. On the other hand, iDVD provides the ability to customize the audio track on the menus, provides more text customization options (e.g., ability to change the font and font size), and enables users to reposition menu items. With Toast, the limited customization options might suffice for users who just want to create a simple DVD and can settle for the out-of-the-box menu templates. Users who want more flexibility in the look and feel of their menus will definitely prefer iDVD.
Video Encoding. Both iDVD and Toast allow you to create DVDs in either standard 4:3 aspect ratio or widescreen 16:9 aspect ratio. Both applications also have the ability to encode videos at 3 different levels of quality, with higher quality requiring longer encoding times. I did not have a chance to directly compare the video quality at each of the 3 levels so do not know if there are significant differences in quality. Perhaps the one area where Toast has an advantage over iDVD is that Toast allows users to burn high definition videos on standard DVDs which can then be played back on Blu-ray players.
Summary. So long as you do not need to burn high definition videos on standard DVDs for viewing on Blu-ray players, I strongly favor iDVD over Toast given its superior yet simple to use menu authoring capabilities. One major caveat is that while Toast and its standalone relative Toast DVD can still be purchased today, Apple no longer sells or supports iDVD. That being said, a discussion thread in Apple Support Communities provides information on how you can purchase and install iDVD if you can get a copy of iLife '09 which contains iDVD.
Lately I've wondered if I should produce both DVD and Blu-ray versions of the recital DVDs for my daughter's school, but I am not sure if it's worth the effort. If anyone has recommendations for Blu-ray disc authoring applications, let me know!
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