While Apple wipes off the hard drive from MacBook Pro and MacBook Air, it doesn't mean that burning DVD on Mac will become obsolete soon. In fact, there are still large number of users use CD/DVD to record their important memories, backup files and share data with friends. With an external DVD drive for Mac, you can simply burn ISO, MP4, video to DVD. What you may note is that to burn different data, you will need different methods and DVD burner for Mac. Here are all the ways on how to burn a DVD on a Mac freely from ISO files, MP4, music and more.

If you're running on MacBook Pro/Air without built-in DVD drive, you may need an external DVD drive for Mac to burn a DVD on Mac.

Basic Info on Mac DVD Burning

Before you start to learn how to burn DVD on Mac with different DVD burning software for macOS, you will need a disc at hand. Do you know what kind of disc is suitable for storing your media? If you're not sure, learn some basic information about different disc types below.

• DVD+R: this disc can be rewritable and reused for burning a DVD on Mac with new contents;
• DVD-R: Compared with DVD+R, DVD-R is a one-time recordable disc, thus it can't be reused or rewritable. You can still copy or burn the disc to new one as well. Those discs are usually cheaper than the DVD+R format;
• ROM: a read-only DVD disc used to permanently store data files;
• RW: it means that the data on a DVD-RW disc can be erased and recorded over numerous times without damaging the medium;
• Single and dual layer: single layer discs can hold 120min or 4.7GB of data, while dual-layer discs can store 8.5GB or 240 minutes. Select the right disc based on your data and purpose.

# How to Burn ISO Files to DVD on Mac

Jan 18, 2021 Free download the Mac DVD burning software and insert a blank disc. First of all, launch the burner, click the dropdown menu and change the format to DVD-Video. Add the video to burn. You can freely add MP4, MKV, MOV, AVI and videos in many more digital formats by drag and drop or click the + button. If you need a free MKV to DVD Converter, Freemake software is the best choice for you. It converts any MKV files to DVD fast and easily. Don’t keep heavy MKV videos on a PC anymore!

1. Insert the blank into the DVD drive.

2. Go to Finder > Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility, launch the free DVD burner for Mac.

3. Click file from the menu and Open Disk Image, or you can drag the ISO file into the left frame of the Disk Utility window.

4. Click Burn and you can start to burn ISO to DVD on Mac.

Important tips:

1. Check the size of the DVD disc and the ISO image to make sure that the blank DVD has enough storage to store the data;
2. In Disk Utility, select the slowest speed available (2x-4x) for the DVD burning on Mac (this also applies to other burning tasks or software). This will ensure the best quality of the burned DVD and avoid any playback errors or other problems with the disc.

To Burn DVD to DVD on Mac, You Need ISO Image First

- Homemade discs: the Disk Utility can copy ISO image from DVDs un-protected: insert DVD > open Disk Utility and select DVD > click 'New Image' > click 'Save As...' to set the output folder > set the 'Image Format' to 'DVD/CD Master' and then click Save.

- Protected discs: the free DVD burner for Mac won't support any DVD protections. If you want to burn DVD on Mac from any commercial discs, there are third-party rippers to help. For example, MacX DVD Ripper Pro, it's extremely useful to copy protected DVD to DVD, as it can rip any types of DVDs into ISO image, MPEG (other digital formats as well) within 5 minutes. Original quality reserved.

# How to Burn MP4 Video to DVD on Mac

As the Disk Utility or other Mac-built in methods (Finder or Command Line) will not accept video formats besides Image files directly, if you want to burn MP4 to DVD on Mac or other formats like avi, mov, mkv etc, you will need third-party DVD burning software for Mac to help. The 100% free MP4 video to DVD burner for Mac recommended here is Burn.

1. Free download the Mac DVD burning software and insert a blank disc. First of all, launch the burner, click the dropdown menu and change the format to DVD-Video.

2. Add the video to burn. You can freely add MP4, MKV, MOV, AVI and videos in many more digital formats by drag and drop or click the + button.

3. The free Mac DVD burner can burn MPG to DVD only, so if you're adding videos in other formats, an message will pop up asking you to convert the videos. Click Convert. If you can't convert with this burner or your source video file is too large for DVD burning, try programs like Handbrake or MacX Video Converter Pro.

4. Click Burn to start to burn mp4 videos to DVD on Mac. Before that, you can adjust the output destination, DVD format, burning speed and other settings.

# How to Burn Audio to CD on Mac

Both Disk Utility and Burn for Mac offer a feature to burn CD/DVD on Mac, but there is another method to burn audio to CD on Mac that some users may ignore: using iTunes. With iTunes serving as free dvd burning software for mac, you can either burn CD/DVD from music downloaded from Apple Music, or movies and videos purchased from iTunes Store. If you don't want to use other DVD burner for Mac to create music CD, try iTunes.

1. Open iTunes and insert the CD. Note that most CD can hold 77 minutes of music.

2. Create a new playlist and add the music you'd like to burn into the playlist.

3. Click File button and select Burn Playlist to Disc.

4. A window will pop up with CD settings. Check the Use Sound Check box to ensure that all the songs on the CD will play at the same volume. Then click Burn to start. Then you can just wait and the free DVD copy software will automatically finish the job.

# Burn DVD Mac Errors & Troubleshooting

Even if you have strictly followed the above steps on how to burn a DVD on a Mac, we understand that there are users facing with failed burn problems. After numerous searching on various forums, we find that most 'unable to burn DVD on Mac' problems are caused by some common reasons. Below we gather those causes and you can check if necessary.

* Dirty optical drive - If the lens of the drive is dirty, it can't read the disc properly and will cause problems. You can try a different computer to see if it's the cause. Then you can buy a lens cleaner, or replace it, or use some compressed air to clean it yourself.

* Bad media - don't forget to try a different disc. If you have choose the right DVD type for your purpose, DVDs in bad quality won't work out either.

* Burning speed - to burn DVD on Mac at the maximum speed can be quick, but it also has problem. Some DVD-R burned at fast burning speed won't be read by some players, or result in bad quality. Try to burn disc content at a slower speed (4x or 2x).

* Repair disk permission - open Disk Utility and select the startup disk > First Aid > click Verify Disk Permissions > Repair Disk Permissions.

DVD Flick is a free DVD authoring program that allows you to take movies (video files) saved on your computer and burn movies to a DVD that can play back in a DVD player, your computer, or Home Cinema set. The software allows you to easily add a menu and add your own subtitles to DVD. Your original video files may be in any of the following container formats: AVI, MOV, MPG, WMV, ASF, FLV (Flash video), Matroska and MPG. Supported codecs include MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, XviD, DivX, WMA and WMV (Windows Media Audio and Video), MP3, OGG Vorbis, H264 and On2 VP5/6. The program is open source.

Burn Movies to DVD

DVD Flick is the all-in-one tool that can convert:
AVI to DVD, HD MOV to DVD, MKV to DVD, MJPG to DVD, MPG to DVD, M2V to DVD, MP4 to DVD, NSV to DVD, NUT to DVD, QT to DVD, MOV to DVD, RM to DVD, SMK to DVD, OGM to DVD, WMV to DVD, ASF to DVD, FLV to DVD, M4V to DVD, WMV to DVD for free.
DVD Flick supports DVD Authoring, ISO image creating, DVD burning also in one tool.

Download the latest version of the DVD Flick website

Step 1Download and run DVD Flick

Step 2Click 'New project' button to create a new project.

Step 3Browse your hard drives to select path to the folder, where the resulting DVD folders

(AUDIO_TS, VIDEO_TS) will be saved. It is highly recommended to use NTFS file system in your OS, cause the temporary m2v files in most cases exceeds 4GB limit for FAT32 file system. Additionally, don't use non-English letters to the browsing path, because the errors could occur during DVD authoring process.

Step 4Add your title - select the video file or files for the project

DVD Flick supports these video file types:M4V, WMV, FLV, AVI, HD MOV, MKV, MJPG, MPG, M2V, MP4, NSV, NUT, QT, MOV, RM, SMK, OGM, ASF, 3GP, 3G2.

Step 5Title added

Left bar indicates how many bytes is used on the blank DVD disc with the default preferences. The percentage depends on the video file size which you have added in the previous guide step.

Step 6Edit title

(1) General settings for the 'Title'. reate chapters every: Purpose of the chapters usage is forward/back skipping forward during the DVD viewing. It is recommended to use this option.
You can also use fixed numbers of chapters - check 'Create' button.
Aspect ratio is an auto detected value received from video file's frame dimension.

(2) Video sources for the 'Title' - this tab informs us about video codec, frame size, Aspect ratio value, frame rate - Frames Per Second.

Frame rate. Check the bottom listing:

• 23,976 FPS - NTSC Film Format
• 25 FPS - PAL Format
• 29,97 FPS - NTSC Format
• 30 FPS - NTSC Format Recommendations for the non-standard
• 12,5 FPS - PAL Format
• 15 FPS - NTSC Format Warning! Remember the format for your file - it will be the same 'Target format' in 'Project settings' .

Add a file to a title: This option allow to you to add new file or files to the 'Title'. It could be additional videos for this DVD, cutted scenes for examples, etc. Important thing is the same FPS for the main video file and the additional file.
Remove a file to a title: You can also remove a file to a title.

(3) Audio tracks tab.
Remove an audio track: Press 'Edit' button, then remove from the 'Audio track sources' additional audio track.
Add an audio track: Press 'Add' button on the 'Audio track sources' tab, select the audio file from hard drive, check in the new 'select audio track(s)' window track(s) you wish to add. Press 'Accept' button. DVD Flick could extract audio tracks from all supported video files (AVI, FLV, HD MOV, MKV, MJPG, MPG, M2V, MP4, M4V, NSV, NUT, QT, MOV, RM, SMK, OGM, WMV, ASF, 3GP, 3G2), and also native audio file formats: AAC, AC3, Flac, MKA, MP3, MP2, MPA, OGG, WAV, WMA
Select language for the additional audio track. Select the audio track, and then select from the'Track language' list box.

(4). Subtitles tab.
Add subtitles. Press 'Add' button on the 'Subtitles' tab, and then select from disk file with subtitles. DVD Flick supports these subtitles formats: AQT, JS, RT, SMI, ASS, SRT, SSA, TXT.
Subtitle settings. Press 'Edit' button to change subtitles settings. Select the language you need. Other settings are for the Font, Font size, and placement of the subtitles. As usually, press 'Accept' button to save setting. 'Force display' option will force subtitle displaying during playback, even they were not selected in menu.

If everything was made rightly, we will see this window with the changed settings for subtitles. There are no more editing tabs for 'Title properties'. Press 'Accept' button to save preferences.

Step 7Project settings. At the DVD Flick main window press 'Project settings' button.

General tab.
Select a 'Target size' for your DVD from list box. The default value is 'DVD (4,3 GB)', default values could be changed by pressing 'Use as defaults' button. If you need to select custom DVD size just scroll up the list box to the 'Custom' value and the bottom 'Custom size' option will be enabled for editing.
'Encoder priority' allows to you to use 'DVD Flick' with high priority in your operating system to decrease full encoding time.

Video tab.
Set your DVD 'Target Format'.
'Encoding profile' for better encoding performance is highly recommended to select as 'Normal' or 'Best'. 'Fastest' and 'Fast' mode decrease full encoding time, but with the lower quality results.
'Target bitrate' is more easy to use as 'Auto fit'. This option will calculate bitrate for encoding automatically depends on DVD 'Target size' and will be set as maximum possible value. If you have some advanced experience with DVD encoding, you can set 'Custom bitrate'.
Set up advanced video options - press 'Advanced' button.
Check 'Second encoding pass' to improve output encoding results. It is highly recommended to use this option, but it wills increase full encoding time.
Check 'Half horizontal resolution' to enable Half D1 DVD Mode - one of the standard for DVD, decreases frame size to 352x576 for PAL and to 352x480 for NTSC (instead of 720x576 (PAL) and 720x480 (NTSC)). Could be used as a possibility to decrease encoding bitrate, for more video length on one DVD disc.
Check 'Add overscan borders' to make your DVD with black left and right borders to view all the source video on your TV.
Deinterlace option is not recommended to use.
Check 'Force MPEG-2 recompression' to recompress your mpeg-2 video source files, do not check option if m2v files were encoded with Cam Video Tool 4 DVD Flick.

Burning tab.
If the 'Create ISO image' is set, the ISO image file will be created on your disk, in the 'Project destination folder'. ISO image could be useful, if you prefer to burn DVD using another application, supporting ISO images. 'MDS' (Media decriptor) file will be created also. If you want to burn your DVD with DVD Flick, check 'Burn project to disc' (red arrow). if you are using DVD+RW, DVD-RW disc, check 'Automatically erase disc if it is rewritable'. If quick erase will be not possible, ImgBurn (included in DVD Flick installation package) will make full erase for rewritable discs.
Accept all 'Project settings' using 'Accept' button. Now we are ready to burn our DVD.

Step 8Burning Movies to DVD

Press 'Create DVD' button at the main window.
DVD Flick will ask for confirmation to proceed - press 'Yes'.
Additional warning about 'Project destination folder' - Press 'Yes'.
'DVD Flick Progress' window shows to user all executed steps.
When the DVD burning will be done, we will see this window. Press 'Close' to return to the DVD Flick main window. In the main window you can save DVD Flick project to your hard drive.

DVD Flick is only for Windows PC users. If you want to burn movies to DVD on Mac, you can use Aiseesoft DVD Creator for Mac. It's a professional Mac Movies to DVD Converter that burn movies (video files) in popular formats such as MOV, AVI, MP4, FLV, M4V and WMV to DVD on Mac.

If you want to convert iTunes videos to DVD, you need to get the videos from iTunes to computer .
And then use DVD flick to convert iTunes videos to DVD for free.
And then using DVD flick to burn YouTube videos on DVD for free. You can also copy videos form other video sites such as veoh, google video, iFlim, vidilife, blip.tv, music.com, zippyvideos, dailymotion, devilducky, etc and then burn them to DVD using this methods.

Here are some other DVD burner.

DVD Styler
DVD Styler is an open source DVD authoring system for Windows and Linux. It converts MPEG files, which you can drag and drop into its window, create NTSC/PAL DVD menus which are highly customizable (you can set image backgrounds, put text and images anywhere, change the font and colors, etc), set chapters for the movie, etc.

DivXtoDVD Perl Script
DivXtoDVD is a Perl script for Linux and other Posix systems (like BSD, Unix, Unix-like operating systems) that converts a DivX movie to DVD compliant files (AUDIO_TS and VIDEO_TS directories and files). It uses transcode, ffmpeg, mjpeg and dvdauthor to do the job in one step. The software is open source. Note that this is different from the commercial ConvertXtoDVD software which was also formerly named DivXtoDVD. If you're looking for the latter, a trial download is available.

ImgBurn
ImgBurn is a lightweight CD / DVD / HD DVD / Blu-ray burning application that everyone should have in their toolkit! It has several 'Modes', each one for performing a different task:

Read - Read a disc to an image file
Build - Create an image file from files on your computer or network - or you can write the files directly to a disc
Write - Write an image file to a disc
Verify - Check a disc is 100% readable. Optionally, you can also have ImgBurn compare it against a given image file to ensure the actual data is correct
Discovery - Put your drive / media to the test! Used in combination with DVDInfoPro, you can check the quality of the burns your drive is producing

Q DVD-Author
Q DVD-Author is essentially a GUI front-end for dvdauthor and other related tools found on a Linux system. You can create DVD menus, convert your projects between PAL and NTSC (and vice versa), create sub-menus, add subtitles, transcode your input videos from other formats, apply multiple audio streams to the videos, give menus multiple soundtracks, create a DVD slideshow, create animated menus, etc. This is an open source program that works under Linux and other Posix OSes.

What do you think of this post?

Excellent

Rating: 4.9 / 5 (based on 35 ratings)

May 30, 2018 18:00 / Updated by Jenny Ryan to DVD Creator

Free Mkv Dvd Burner

• Create DVD with HD Video

  Learn how to convert HD video (MKV, TS, MTS, M2TS, TRP, TP, TOD) to DVD with HD to DVD Converter.

• How to Burn iMovie to DVD with iMovie 10

  The article shows an easy way to burn iMovie to DVD without iDVD.

• How to Play DVD on Windows

  Want to find a reliable DVD Player for Windows 10/8.1/8? Read this article to find the best DVD Player for Windows.