Now that my wife and I have a child, we make frequent use of our Flip UltraHD video camera. Our intention is to film precious moments of our lives, burn physical DVDs, and mail them to our families strewn across the east coast and midwest. Sounds old-fashioned, but it's convenient for our audience.

I will explain DVD creation for Mac users and for Windows users.

Flip -> DVD on a Mac

For those of you blessed with a recent Mac, creating a DVD from the Flip is straightforward:

  1. Copy MP4 files from Flip to your computer (not strictly necessary, though iDVD is much snappier if the videos are on your hard drive)
  2. Open iDVD, select Magic iDVD
  3. Rename your movies to reflect their contents (optional, but makes the DVD a little nicer)
  4. Drag movies into the iDVD window
  5. Create project
  6. Tweak title, button fonts, text
  7. Burn to disc image
  8. Use Disk Utility to burn as many copies as you want!

Flip -> DVD on Windows Vista/7

  1. First of all, Windows DVD Maker doesn't support Flip's MP4 files directly. It will crash or hang if you try.
  2. Download the Adobe Flash CS4 trial
  3. Use Adobe Media Encoder to convert the Flip videos to AVI or some such.
  4. Add to Windows DVD Maker.
  5. Configure title and menus.
  6. Wait an evening for Windows DVD Maker to casually burn your DVD to disc.
  7. Frown because the audio and video are no longer synchronized. Also the video is corrupted.
  8. Buy a Mac and use iDVD after all.

I wrote this post months ago but I was waiting to figure out how to create DVDs on Windows... At some point, it's worth simply buying a Mac Mini and using that instead.