Make Your Own 5-in-1 movie DVD

There’s nothing as relaxing as sitting on a couch with some snacks and a can of cola and watching a couple of movies back-to-back on a hot Sunday afternoon. So you dump the movies you wish to see on a USB flash drive and plug it into your DVD player. Then all you have to do is press the play button and sit back and relax. However if your DVD player doesn’t play DivX videos then you don’t have any choice but to play them one after the other or convert DivX movies to DVDs.

A standard 4.7 GB DVD (single layer) can hold only around two hours of video with surround sound and subtitles. This is because the audio and video are encoded at a high bit rate for better quality. However it’s possible to squeeze around five movies on a single disc by lowering the bit rate and converting the audio to stereo format—that’s around 10 hours of video on a 4.7 GB DVD or 20 hours on a dual-layer DVD. The video quality is good enough for watching on a smaller TV with stereo speakers. However, if you have a large screen TV you can use a dual-layer DVD and fit four movies for better video quality.

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We show you how to compile your own 5-in-1 movie disc that will play in any DVD player. To make it even more interesting we will create a fancy menu with animated thumbnails and background music for selecting movies and favorite scenes. You can also use this workshop to squeeze ten hours of video that you shot with your camcorder on a single DVD.

Creating your own 5-in-1 DVD

Step 1: Rip DVDs to hard drive

Get ready with the DivX / MP4 files that you wish to include on the DVD. If you want to add a movie from a DVD you’ll first have to rip it to your hard drive. Go to www.brothersoft.com and download DVD Decrypter. Insert the movie DVD in the optical drive and start DVD Decrypter. Go to the Mode menu and select IFO. Then go to the Input pane to the right and select the program chain (PGC) that corresponds to the movie. You can identify it by its playback length—the lengthiest one is the movie. Specify the location on your hard drive where you want the ripped movie to be saved and hit the big Decrypt button at the bottom left corner of the window.

Step 2: Get ready for action

Before you proceed to the core of the process, you need a few things in place. Get the standard version of K-Lite Codec Pack from here. The audio and video codecs are required by the software to decode MPEG-4 videos. If you have a DVD player that supports DivX you can convert the ripped movie to DivX format at this point. Download AutoGK from here and specify the IFO file in the folder that you ripped the movie as the input file and specify the output path to the output file. Select the audio track and output size and click on the Add Job button to queue the task. Select a predefined size or specify a custom size. Hit Start.
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Step 3: Add your movies to the menu and configure the background and buttons

Download and install Sony DVD Architect Studio 4.5 from here the and launch it. The application starts with a blank menu page. Select the Explorer tab in the bottom left corner of the window and navigate to the folder where your movies are saved. Double click on the movie that you wish to put on the DVD. You’ll see the thumbnail and title of the movie when it’s added to the menu.

In the case of a DVD movie, add only the IFO file in the folder that you ripped the movie. Add up to five movies to the DVD. Select a theme or background and buttons of your choice from the browser.

Step 4: Resize and rearrange the thumbnails. Jazz up the thumbnails by