• DVD Styler: does the basics including menu, but UI could use some improvements (but what do you expect for free)
• DVD Flick: didn’t produce a usable DVD and did support making own templates
• Sothink Movie Maker: nicest except that it doesn’t support menu making

Choice is DVD styler. Improvements that would be nice:

• keyboard shortcuts to
  • add text to menu
  • inc/dec grid size of menu canvas
  • remove files from edit stream
• provide more info for video files in a folder (currently only thumbnails, should show size & duration at least) and allow to sort on columns of info
• provide visual way to select custom frame for thumbail used in menu box
• ability to resume if failed due to running out of space during transcoding or ISO creation
• log window should show which title is being transcoded and estimated time left
• progress bar of generation of DVD (incl any transcoding, ISO creation)
• time stamps in log window

JFreeChart is a free 100% Java chart library that makes it easy for developers to display professional quality charts in their applications.

Not tried yet, but examples looked nice. Found via some other site that used it.

There are two types of DVD’s: data and video (DVD-Video). Only Video type can be played in DVD player.

Create DVD-Video from video stored on a miniDV tape:

1. Capture: With Camera connected to PC via USB, use Windows Movie Maker,
   1. very easy to use: just click “capture” on WMM and it will control videocam playback all automatically such as find beginning, play tape, capture, and close capture when no more video (even if end of tape not reached, which is really nice).
   2. This results in a WMV file, roughly 1 gig per hour. Seems possible to capture to mpeg-2 format (not tried), if so use this instead since may avoid the transcoding step (3).
2. Author: Using DVDStyler
   1. Drag and drop the thumbnails movies you want from its File Browser panel onto the menu canvas and edit as desired with text, using grid size to help align items.
   2. Click on each clip in the filmstrip and change its “post command” to point to the next clip, if you want automatic chaining of clips (default is to return to top level menu)
   3. Go to DVD | Options and select a bit rate in range of 2 – 4 Mb/s, which should give you 4 to 2 hours of DVD time approx. Have found that even 2 Mb/s, can’t tell difference (probably could if you looked at a 2 vs 8 side by side, but just looking at video produced on plasma display, you can’t tell that it’s lower bandwidth signal).
   4. Save a project; save in same folder as source WMV files; project is an XML file
3. Generate ISO: Still sing DVDStyler
   1. click Burn
   2. when dialog appears, tell it to just generate ISO. Tell it to put ISO in same place (or roundabout) where the DVDStyler project XML file is located.
4. Burn: Use a tool like Nero Express or Deep Burner to burn ISO.
   • Note that Nero Express burns about 3 times faster that Deep Burner.

Trick:

• Step 1 and 4 (above) can be done on slower machine,
  • as long as it has USB 2.0 ports so that camcorder and DVD-RW drive can be plugged to it,
  • with the folder containing captured video (WMV) being a Windows Share,
  • only need capturing and DVD-burning software (no need for DVDStyler)
• Steps 2 and 3 can be done on the fastest multi-core machine available,
  • where you install DVDStyler
  • with a drive mapped to the share on slow machine
  • don’t forget to save the DVDStyler project AND iso on the Share
• Advantage of this trick is that you can author and transcode on the fast machine, while capturing and burning on the other, slower one where CPU speed is not as essential  (yes capturing can require a good CPU but you wouldn’t care as much if doing this parallel process since the transcoding is the slowest step — best of course would be to capture straight to mpeg2 format, don’t know if Windows Movie Maker does that).

Create DVD-Video from digi-cam (camcorder that saves as digital movie on harddisk instead of analog on magnetic tape): see my other blog post where I give some details

Create data DVD: once capture is done (based on camcorder type, see above),

1. Author: Using Nero Express, select DVD Data, then add as many WMV files as will fit on the DVD.
2. Burn & Label

Notes:

• Writing speed vs DVD types: Seems like DVD-R, DVD+R, and DVD+R DL (dual layer) are the fastest formats to write with.
• Trancoding:
  • If video is in MPG2 format (.MPG), no transcoding is necessary.
  • As of version 1.7.3 of DVDStyler, supports multi-core: this makes a HUGE difference for the transcoding step used to transcode the digitized miniDV (WMV if done with Windows Movie Maker) since this step is compute-bound: 2 cores doubles the number of frames per second (FPS) that can be transcoded. For instance my old single-core desktop that I use as our media server could only transcode about 14 FPS. My fancy Dell XPS 1710 could do 20 FPS using version 1.7.2 of DVDStyler since that version didn’t support multicore. This went up to 40 FPS using versoin 1.7.3, this is almost 3 times faster than my desktop could do, so instead of using over 3 hours for transcoding 2 hours of footage, barely more than an hour was sufficient on my XPS, much more manageable.
  • JVC digi-camcorders record in .MOD format. The .MOD format is basically the .MPG format with some header information changes, and some of the recording parameters are stored in an accompanying .MOI file for each .MOD file. It appears to be sufficient therefore to rename .MOD file to .MPG, and tell the software (DVDStyler or whatever you use) that the aspect ratio is 16:9 rather than 4:3 (which you can see in the camcorder settings). If you have changed between aspect ratios (bad idea in the first place, but we all make mistakes) many times, your best bet is probably the software that comes with JVC cam, ie Cyberlink’s PowerDirector which knows how to transcode .MOD to .MPG. I have not checked to see if PowerDirector does a full transcode or is smart enough to change merge the .MOI file into the .MPG, if not then this step could be rather time consuming (PowerDirector doesn’t take advantage of multi-core so the transcoding is like older version of DVDStyler).
• Have tried various software, DVDStyler seems to be the most usable of free ones. DVDFlick other popular but didn’t produce a usable DVD-Video for me, plus its menu creation is much less powerful than DVDStyler (and you have to buy extra templates). PowerProducer is slow and menu creation is limited.

PureText: when pasting from clipboard, removes all formatting first. Great for copy/paste between rich text applications when you just want the data and not the formatting.

Free Extended Task Manager and Process Explorer: great replacements for Window’s Task Manager. FETM provides nice time plots of various performance metrics, PE provides a tree view of proceses that can be really handy to figure out which parent to kill to also kill child processes.

PDFCreator: adds a virtual printer that saves printout to PDF. Great because it can therefore be used by any program that can send data to printer even if program knows nothing about PDF.

Download.com doesn’t compare freeware but has a nice category tree of freeware with dowload stats (which one would assume to be a good indicator of quality/usefulness). In particular it has an excellent list of security-related software, it is easy to find for each “security class”, such as “firewall”, “antivirus”, etc, which programs are the most popular.

Note that it comes with XmlDiff to diff XML files. XML diff can also be done with WinMerge with its XML plugin but XmlDiff seems able to find nodes that have been moved, though it doesn’t clearly show which node moved where (just uses colors, no lines or arrows).

Windows PowerShell Owner’s Manual: The place to go to for getting started with Windows PowerShell and for high-level reference

A complete email server supporting POP3, IMAP and SMTP protocols. Users
can use any client such as MS Outlook, Mozilla Thunderbird or any other
email client to send and receive emails. It has a built-in web server
and a relational database. All this reduces configuration time and you
can be up and running in minutes.

MailEnable: seems most popular on softpedia.org (which doesn’t list xeams) but still not hugely downloaded (3000 total) but well maintained.

Not easy to get real popularity info on either of these, though google hit # is 55k for MailEnable but only 50 for Xeams.