What features does DVDStyler offer for creating DVDs?

Updated

DVDStyler is a cross-platform, free DVD authoring application for Linux and Windows, distributed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). If your goal is to turn video files into a DVD that plays on a standalone DVD player — with a real menu rather than just a data disc — its feature set covers that whole path: authoring, menu design, and burning.

Core authoring and burning

  • Create and burn DVD video with interactive menus. The output is a DVD-Video disc with navigation, not a folder of files.
  • Use MPEG and VOB files without reencoding. If your source is already DVD-compliant, DVDStyler can place it on the disc as-is, which saves time and avoids quality loss. The site points to its FAQ for the specifics of when this applies.
  • Put files with different audio/video formats on one DVD through titleset support, so you aren't forced to normalize everything before starting.

Menu design

Menus are where DVDStyler goes beyond a simple burn tool:

  • Start from a ready-to-use template or design your own menu from scratch.
  • Flexible menu creation based on scalable vector graphics, so elements stay sharp rather than being fixed-size bitmaps.
  • Import an image file as a background.
  • Place buttons, text, images, and other graphic objects anywhere on the menu screen.
  • Change the font, color, and other parameters of buttons and graphic objects.
  • Scale any button or graphic object, and copy any menu object or an entire menu to reuse your work.
  • Customize navigation using DVD scripting when the standard button links aren't enough.

Content and format support

  • Add multiple subtitle and audio tracks to a single title.
  • Create photo slideshows as DVD content.
  • Source formats include AVI, MOV, MP4, MPEG, OGG, WMV, and others; audio/video codecs include MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, Xvid, MP2, MP3, AC-3, and others.
  • Multi-core processor support speeds up any transcoding that is required.

Interface

The application uses a user-friendly interface with drag & drop support, which matters most when you're arranging menu objects and ordering titles.

What it is not

The page describes DVDStyler as a DVD authoring and burning tool — it is not presented as a video editor or a Blu-ray authoring application, and no pricing tiers, paid editions, or account requirements are mentioned. It is described as Open Source Software and completely free under the GPL.

Related tool

The same project page lists MP4Joiner, a simple free tool for joining multiple MP4 files into one without reencoding and without quality loss — useful if you need to combine clips before authoring.

If your task is "take my video files and produce a playable DVD with a custom menu," DVDStyler's feature list addresses each step. If you need to edit the video itself, or author Blu-ray or 4K discs, that falls outside what this page describes.