My video to DVD converter of choice is ConvertXtoDVD. While not free, it is offering in my opinion unparalleled comfort in regards to converting more or less all video files you come across to video DVDs. If you do not like the idea of paying for a program to create video DVDs, you may have stumbled upon Freemake Video Converter before.
It is a free program that you can use to convert video files to various formats, including DVD but also for mobile use, as audio files or to generic video file formats. You can use it to burn videos to DVD, and while you do not get a lot of advanced options, it does serve its purpose nicely in most cases.
Some of the issues that you may run into are that the conversions to video DVD add black bars to the video that are too large to ignore. Plus, you can't really make any changes to bitrates or the quality of the output as it is all handled by the program automatically.
The developers of the program have released version 4.0 of Freemake Video Converter today, and along with it comes something that is called the Gold Pack. I'm probably not the only one interested in what the Gold Pack has to offer.
My first thought after reading about it was that it is some kind of premium upgrade to the program that adds features to it when you pay for it. This as it turns out is not completely correct.
When you click on install after you have opened Freemake Video Converter 4.0, you are taken to a screen where you get two options to upgrade the program with the Gold Pack:
- Donate: Donate to Freemake to get access to the Gold Pack
- Free: Install Freemake as the customized search provider and homepage in installed browsers on the system.
What you get for that? The Gold Pack adds the following features to the video converter:
- Black Bars Removal: The developers promise that black bars will be automatically detected and removed from videos.
- Exclusive DVD Menus: Additional DVD menus to choose from when creating video DVDs.
- Any DVD background: Add custom DVD backgrounds to the DVD menus and add custom titltes.
- Automatic Backup: All modifications you make to projects are automatically backed up.
Is it worth letting the program make the browser modifications on your system? Considering that you can easily uninstall the modifications again at any time, I'd say it is worth a thought if you ran into black bar issues before using the program.
Version 4.0 of Freemake Video Converter introduces less than a handful of features that are not related to the Gold Pack. The developers state that they have fixed a problem with the temporary DVD folder, improved the software's overall stability, and made minor interface changes.
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Freemake is not bad, but it can only be used either by donating first or installing some adware, not pretty. I ran across this Reincubate Video Converter software, real easy to use and supports a variety of formats - DVD, AVI, 3GP, MKV, WMV and many more.