Nowadays, more and more people love to burn their videos or movies to a DVD disc to watch on their DVD player. If you never have the experience of burning a playable DVD disc, you might not be familiar with the term finalization. The process of finalization means that you have to finalize a DVD after you have authored it, otherwise it will not be successfully played on a DVD player. Most of the playing error happened during the playing process of a burned DVD are caused by not finalizing the DVD after authoring movies onto it. So, finalizing a DVD is very important if you want to burn your own DVD that can play on a DVD player. You might know how to burn an MP4 to a DVD, but do you know how to finalize the disc? Today we will learn something about the DVD finalization and we will talk about how to finalize a DVD on Windows 10, finally, I will introduce a way to author a DVD disc without manually finalizing it. So, let's get started.

Part 1: Why DVD needs to be finalized?

Finalization of a burned optical disc, also known as closing the disc, is the process of writing out support data, including DVD menus or table of contents and directory data, to enable it to play on all other systems. Once a blank CD has been finalized, it cannot have any more data written on it. To finalize the disc means that you don't want to do any further authoring activities to the disc, and you want to finish your work right where you are.

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Why DVD needs to be finalized? Well, when authoring a DVD disc, if you don't finalize it after you write files or data on the disc, you will not be able to play it on a regular DVD player. You will encounter some error messages from the DVD player telling you that the disk cannot be played. If you finalize DVD disc at this point, and try to play on the video player again, the problem should be solved.

But how to finalize a DVD after authoring it? In the next part, I will teach you how to finalize a DVD on Windows 10.

Part 2: How to finalize a DVD on Windows 10

As introduced above, before you can use a recordable disc (such as CD-R, DVD-R, or DVD+R) formatted with the Live File System format in other computers and devices, you need to close the current disc session to prepare the disc for use. By default, Windows closes your disc automatically when it is ejected.

To close a disc automatically, you can press the Eject button on your computer's disc drive., and Windows automatically closes the current session. This consumes 20 megabytes (MB) of disc space and can take several minutes.

You can also follow the steps below:

Step 1: Open File Explorer.
Step 2: Click the DVD drive.
Step 3: Click Close session on the toolbar. Now the session will be closed, so the disc can be used in other computers.

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If you have DVD or CD burning software that allows finalizing, the process is simple. Once you have finished burning, a "Finalize" or "Done" or "Close disc" button will appear. Clicking this button will ensure the finalization of your discs. This process can be applied on most programs that require manual finalization. There are some other DVD burning programs that can finalize the DVD automatically, use those programs will make the process even easier.

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Part 3: How to tell if DVD is finalized

Then, how can you tell if your DVD disc has been finalized or not? Actually, there are quite a few ways to help you out. Here we would like to list them as below:

1.To check whether your DVD disc is finalized or not, the first thing you could do is check the drive properties in File Explorer. If the Free Space shows as 0, then the disc is finalized. If the Free Space > 0, then the disc is not finalized.

2.Secondly, if File Explorer fails, you could choose some third-party software tools like InfraRecorder, a disc-burning application that will tell you the disc status. You don't need to attempt to burn anything. Such tools will show the DVD disc type, status, free space, used space, etc. You could easily learn whether or not your DVD discs have been finalized or not.

Part 4: How to make a DVD without finalizing

As mentioned above, there are some DVD burning programs that provide a button for you to click to finalize the DVD after is authored, while there are still some other programs that can do the finalization process itself automatically without having to receive any command from you. These programs are usually easier to use and simpler to understand. You can use them too author a DVD disc without worrying about the problem of finalization. The program that I am going to introduce today, Leawo DVD Creator, is one of those programs.

  • Leawo DVD Creator
  • Leawo DVD Creator

    Create DVD-9/DVD-5 discs playable on various standalone DVD players and computers without region restriction.

    Create DVD content in either NTSC or PAL for DVD players for various regions.

    Convert and burn videos in 180+ file formats to DVD disc, folder and/or ISO image file.

    Edit video files such as adding image/text watermark, trimming video length, cropping video size, adjusting video effect, applying 3D effect, etc.

    Select disc menu for output DVD content, or even design disc menu with your own pictures and songs.

    Burn photos to DVD photo slideshow with built-in photo slideshow editor.

With Leawo DVD Creator, you can create your own playable DVD disc without worrying about the finalization problem within minutes. Here are the detailed steps to create a DVD disc with Leawo DVD Creator.

Step 1: Download and install Leawo DVD Creator

Step 2: Insert a blank DVD disc to your DVD drive and launch Leawo DVD Creator.

Step 3: Import your file by clicking the "Add Video" button or directly drag the file into the frame in the center.

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Step 4: You can now edit your video by clicking the "edit" button. As mentioned above, you can trim, crop, add watermark, add 3D affects to your video here.

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Step 5: You can design a DVD menu if you want to. The DVD template zone is on the right. Choose a template and you can preview and edit it.

Step 6: Once you have done all the edit and menu designing work, you can click the green "burn" button to choose an output directory and start to burn your DVD.

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Step 7: Now you just wait for the process to be done.

Conclusion

If you want to author a playable DVD disc, you have to know how to finalize it after you have done the authoring process. However, if you are using a DVD burning program that can finalize the DVD automatically, like Leawo DVD Creator, you will never have to worry about the problem of finalization. All the work can be done by the program self, and you can focus on getting more creative, and making your DVD more beautiful.