DVD Flick: Simple, streamlined DVD burner

Normally I just use Windows Movie Maker when I need to burn the occasional video DVD, but this weekend I ran into a predicament: I already had videos on my computer (rather than using the utility to download the video from the camera directly) and the clips were in a variety of formats: MPEG, AVI, and even QuickTime, a year's worth of little snippets of the kids playing and acting insane. Windows Movie Maker couldn't even open most of the clips.

Solution: DVD Flick, a freeware utility that can make DVDs (and ISO files) from whatever video clips you have lying around and takes minimal effort to figure out.

DVD Flick supports 45 file formats (including Flash) and 60 video codecs, making it invaluable at cobbling together one long video out of numerous, incompatible clips. It's not a video editor, mind you -- you can't clip footage out of individual video files -- but you can pick and choose as many clips as you'd like with which to populate your disc. You can also add subtitles and/or a secondary audio track (commentary or whatnot). As well, there's a simple menu building system but, for some reason, this didn't work on the DVDs I burned over the weekend. That's actually not a bad thing: The discs start playing immediately when you put them in a DVD player, which can be a time saver.

Time to encode and burn a DVD? A little over an hour, for a 40-minute disc. But best of all, no errors or hiccups along the way -- at least once I'd found the box where you click "Burn project to disc." The finished products look great.

Check out DVD Flick and consider this tool next time you're looking to make DVDs out of all the video odds and ends you've got lying around.