Now we're all tied to our computers 24/7 downloading megabuckets of online, advert-free audio visual entertainment it sometimes seems like the simple pleasures of life, such as watching a bit of TV from the comfort of your sofa are long gone. However, it doesn't have to be like this, as it is easy enough to convert many types of video playable on a computer - for instance .avi or .wmv files that you may have downloaded from who knows where - to a format suitable for putting on a real life physical DVD no less.

If you remember your last 20th / early 21st century technology well you may recall you can then put this silver disk into the machine under your TV and off you go, custom TV and films from the comfort of ones' living room setup.

Now, in past times, this sort of file format conversion malarkey was rather within the realms of geekery. It helped to understand the ins and outs of the various formats, specifications, protocols, bit-rates et al, and also to have enough dedication to download and link all manner of different programs to sort it out for you, particularly if you didn't fancy splashing out the cash. However, the Poorhouse has recently stumbled on a lovely free program that runs on Windows called Avi2DVD that makes this sort of operation really rather simple. It still takes an age to do unless you have a supercomputer, but in the sense that you can set it going overnight and wake up to a freshly-brewed DVD rather than anything ostensibly complex needing to be done by your good self.

So here's how to make a classic home-made DVD: a disk with a few episodes of whatever the latest and greatest TV series is. Let's go 'Heroes' for the time being, although clearly if you don't own some sort of rights to Heroes you wouldn't be doing this, oh no siree. It's just a useful example of an easy process to convert avi video files into a DVD. You could probably make slightly better DVDs by tweaking various options that this article ignores, but this seems to produce OK results for us lazy amateurs.

Firstly, download a) Avi2DVD, and b) your choice of video content to make DVDs from.

Make sure the videos actually play on your computer first. If you get strange blank screens, errors and the like it may mean you are missing "codecs" - filters to allow video to be compressed or decompressed for playback in a specific manner. Sorting out codecs really can get a bit geeky, so one solution might be to download a nice big codec pack to cover most bases in one fell swoop. The Poorhouse has had success with the K-Lite codec pack. The documentation of Avi2DVD itself contains some codec advice too.

Once you have working videos, you're probably good to go. The first thing to consider if you're making a DVD from TV episodes or other relatively short videos is that you may want more than one on a single disk. This is doable with Avi2DVD; it just requires that you rename your files to WHATEVER CD1.avi, WHATEVER CD2.avi, WHATEVER CD3.avi and so on before beginning. The files should also all be in the same folder.

This is how the Poorhouse would have theoretically named his files to create a Heroes DVD for episodes 18-20.

Now it's time to load Avi2DVD. Isn't it colourful?

Basically, we need to work through the tabs on the top from left to right. The tab marked "Step 1 Input" should be selected by default. Here you should use the "Load avi/ogm/mkv/wmv" button to select the video you wish to make into a DVD. If you have used the CD1, CD2 type technique in order to combine several files into a single DVD then you need only select the CD1 file, and Avi2DVD will understand that the rest should be included. Once the file is selected you then need to pick an audio stream from the dropdowns on the right. Often there will only be one option, but some files may have, for instance, a choice of different languages that could be selected.

Then pick the "Step 2 Output" tab within Avi2DVD.

Here, ensure that you have chosen to create a DVD as opposed to a VCD at the top left if that's what you want to do, and that the correct DVD disk capacity is selected in the middle. Avi2DVD will ensure that the videos you select end up small enough to fit on the final DVD. Of course, as a generalisation, the longer the DVD the worse the quality will be due to lack of space. Also ensure "Make Iso" is ticked. You'll see the path of where Avi2DVD will leave your created DVD files here too - change it if you like by pressing the little folder icon to the left of the path it gives by default.

"Chapter List" on the right allows you to define where your DVD chapter boundaries are - i.e. when you press "Next chapter" on your DVD player where the video will go to. By default this is set to be every five minutes, but it is generally more useful, especially when dealing with episodes, to set it manually. What you need here are the numbers of seconds from the start of the video that you would like to set each of the the chapters to. The episodes of Heroes on this disk are going to be 2607 seconds long, therefore it makes sense to have the chapters at 0 seconds (for the first episode), 2607 seconds (for the start of episode 2) and 2607+2607 = 5214 seconds for the start of episode 3.

Then move on to the tab "Step 3 Encoders". This presents you with a choice of what software you'd like to use to encode your avi video into something suitable for playback on a DVD machine. If you have a preference, by all means select it. The Poorhouse did not really have a clue which ones were the best but heard somewhere or other that selecting HCEnc and putting it on the "best" profile was a decent choice for DVD manufacture, and practice has borne that theory out. So pick that, in the absence of the possibility of any better-informed decision.

The "Step 4 Subtitles" tab would, unsurprisingly, allow you to add subtitles to your DVD should you have the requisite subtitles files. The Poorhouse hasn't ever bothered with that option so no more shall be said about it here. You are certainly free to ignore this tab if you too don't want subtitles.

You should then press the Add Job button near the bottom of the window, which will add your selected DVD project to the Job Queue.

Moving onto "Step 5 DVD Menu"...this is again an optional step, but can lead to prettier results. This is how you can make a custom menu for when the DVD is put into the machine. For instance you could have a nice title screen allowing the selection of which episode to play. If you don't go through this step the DVD will still work, but it will launch straight into your video rather than giving the users any options or intro screens.

If you want to take the time to make such a menu then go into the "Create DVD Menu" and have a mess around there, selecting at least a background graphic, sound and a play button, before clicking "Use this menu on job 1" (assuming you are only making 1 dvd at a time) and Save Menu. The Capture Images and Mp3->Mp2 buttons on tab 5 open other applications allowing you to get screenshots and convert sounds for use in these custom DVD menus easily. Here's an example of a simple DVD menu created in less than one minute, with a garish lime green start button. Yum.

When your menu is either done and saved, or you decided you don't need one, just press the enthusiastically-named "GO !!!" button near the bottom left of the Avi2DVD window. This will then start processing the Job Queue, i.e. the videos and settings you've just set up. Now it is time to go away for a long time and wait. It took the Poor-computer a good long overnight session to get all the number crunching involved done. The tickbox "Shutdown when done" near the middle left of the screen is a blessing if you want to sleep but don't want to make your poor computer stay on indefinitely.

When done, you should end up with a folder in the location selected in "Step 2 Output" with a few files in, generally called Avi2dvd_temp. In this folder you will find a couple of important things. The first is a subfolder called "DVD" containing folders AUDIO_TS and VIDEO_TS. This is basically a DVD proper, stored on your harddrive, i.e. what you'd get if you copied the files from a DVD directly to your computer. You can test out the DVD before wasting an actual DVD disk by opening the VIDEO_TS files in whatever program your computer plays DVDs in. The Poor-computer came with a program "PowerCinema" which works for that, you may have others such as WinDVD et al.

If you're happy with the results, it's time to make the actual DVD. For this you will need a DVD disk, and of course a DVD burner. Don't feel the need to try copying the above files onto the DVD directly though; a nice easy one-step way is to use the file in the default "Avi2dvd_temp" folder called DVD_Image.iso. An ISO file is this context is basically an exact image of an entire DVD disk. It contains all the information needed on the disk in one snapshot file. You should therefore burn this iso file to the physical DVD disk. Do not simply copy it with a file-copying program; you need to use a specific ISO-burning program that will ensure the replica image is created on the disk rather than the big .iso file itself , which your DVD player will not be able to read.

Your DVD-recoder likely came with software to do this. The Poorhouse's came with "Sonic RecordNow!" which has a "Burn Image" option for this exact task. If you don't have one, then programs like Iso Recorder, Nero, Easy CD Creator, DVD Decrypter, or ImgBurn are all available for download on the web, some for free, some not.

Once that's done, you have a brand spanking new DVD with your videos on to use as you will. Chuck it into your DVD player, whether computer or standalone, and all being well it should work like any other DVD.