Can VLC Burn DVD? YES! Burn A DVD with VLC with Easy Steps

VLC Media Player, one of the most popular and powerful media player software, is the first choice of many people to watch movies, play DVDs, and listen to music. Besides the movie and music playing feature, the VLC also provides users with its DVD ripping capability to rip files from an optical disc.

Given that many people are now obsessed with VLC, they become curious about the face that whether VLC can burn a DVD with local files so that they don’t have to use third-party software to carry a DVD burning task.

The puzzle – ‘Can VLC burn a DVD’ has become the itch for most VLC fans and DVD fans. To avoid any confusion, let me make one thing clear that VLC can burn a DVD for no doubt. You may check out the following content in this post to find the correct steps.

I. How to burn a DVD with VLC

Before I start, you must read these few tips to make sure the DVD burning ends well.

1. Prepare a correct blank disc.

To burn files to a DVD, you need to get yourself a disc that supports burning, like the DVD-R and DVD-RW.

Depending on the source files to burn to the DVD, make sure you get a disc that has a suitable capacity, like the DVD-5 disc for 4,7GB and DVD-9 disc for 8.5GB.

Read: DVD5 V.S. DVD9 – What are the Differences between DVD5 and DVD9

2. Convert the source movie into an MPEG2 video file.

VLC is not one of those professional DVD burning programs that can burn all kinds of files to a DVD. you can only use VLC to burn MPEG2 video (mp2v) and audio (mp2a) files in PAL or NTSC format.

Tip:

MPEG2 is a file compression standard for DVD videos and audios.
PAL and NTSC are the 2 TV standards that you need to decide on your files based on the country you’re currently living in. If you don’t choose to convert your files into the correct format, your DVD’ll fail to play on the TV and DVD player at your home.

PAL: Europe, Australia, Latin America, Asia, most African countries.
NTSC: US, Canada, Japan, etc.

Most professional DVD burning software support burning a DVD with various formats because they will convert the source files into DVD format before burning to a disc. And VLC does not have that kind of power.

So, to make sure your disc is playable to other devices, convert the footage to MPEG2 PAL/NTSC format with a professional media converter.

Using VLC to burn DVD

Step 1 Insert a blank DVD into the disc drive and launch VLC

Step 2 Load up the MPEG2 file to VLC

On VLC, locate Media and choose Stream.

On the Open Media window, click Add and import the file you plan to burn.

Tip: If you have any external subtitle tracks waiting to add to the movie, tick the Use a subtitle file option and click Browse to import the subtitle track.

Click Stream to proceed. VLC will display the source file on the interface, click Next to confirm

Step 3 Set the disc drive as the destination

Then, on the Destination Setup window, tick the Display locally option and click Add to set the DVD drive as the destination.

Tip: For Windows computers, while setting the DVD drive as the default destination for the burning, a window will pop out and ask you ‘how do you want to use the disc’. Here, tick the second option – With a CD/DVD player, and click Next to confirm.

After deciding the destination of the burning, click the Next to proceed.

Step 5 Decide the codec

Here, check the Activate Transcoding option and then click Tools.

On a new pop-out window:

If you want to burn a movie to the disc, go to the Video codec tab and set the Codec as MPEG-2.
To burn audio files, you need to click Audio Codec and choose A52/AC-3 as the codec.

Click Save to use the codec to burn the file to the DVD.

Step 5 Complete the process

Finally, you will come to a window named Option Setup. There, you need to check the Stream all elementary stream option.

Now, everything is set, you may click the Stream button to initiate a DVD burning with VLC.

Tip: For Windows users, there may be one more step.

Open the folder of your disc drive and you may see the list of ‘Files Ready to Be Written to the Disc’. In this case, you need to right-click on any blank space on the folder and click Burn to Disc.

Click Next to start the burning. The file will be burned to the disc right away.

When the burning is complete, you can play the disc on your computer or TV and see if the burning went well.

To warp up

VLC is truly not a perfect tool to burn a DVD since it comes with so many restrictions and the steps are quite complicated. Worse still, if you fancy a homemade movie disc with a stylish menu, custom chapters, and titles, VLC is incapable of helping you with that.

In this case, you may use Tipard DVD Creator to burn local files to a DVD.

Burn a DVD with a more advanced VLC alternative

As a professional DVD burner program, Tipard DVD Creator saves you lots of effort while burning local files to a DVD. You don’t have to convert the files to MPEG2 since Tipard will do the conversion. So, you can import multiple formats, like MP4, MKV, AVI, MP3, to Tipard and it will burn them all to a DVD with ease.

Apart from that, Tipard offers private disc producers the chance to create a homemade movie disc. Users can design a perfect menu for their DVD to play on certain occasions.

Now, let’s see how to burn a DVD with Tipard DVD Creator.

Step 1 Launch Tipard DVD on your computer

Insert a blank DVD into the disc tray and launch Tipard on your computer.

Tip: Don’t have on on your Windows or Mac machine? Click the buttons and get it for free.

Step 2 Load up the files to Tipard

On your computer, locate the target file and drag it to Tipard, release it. The program will start to process the file.

Tip: Tipard supports multitasking, so if you plan to burn multiple files, import them all to Tipard.

Step 3 Set up for the disc content

As Tipard finishes processing the file, you need to:

Decide the audio channel and subtitle track of the movie/music;
Locate Disc Type and choose DVD-5 or DVD-9 based on the disc you insert;
Set Video Quality as High to burn the file losslessly.
Click Power Tools to have access to the in-app video editors.

Click Next to proceed.

Step 4 Design the menu for the DVD

Here, you may re-position buttons, add background music, change background scene, add opening film (like those professionals Disney or Marvel do), etc.

Don’t need a menu for the disc? Check No Menu.

Hit Burn to go on.

Step 5 Start to burn a DVD

On the new window, focus on one last option: PAL or NTSC. Choose one based on the country you live in.

Lastly, hit Burn and Tipard will start to burn the file to the inserted DVD. You’ll have a personalized movie DVD in a few minutes. Make sure you keep it well-preserved to avoid data loss.