"Part of what makes today's consumer-friendly DVD authoring tools so accessible is their success in shielding users from encoding and other techie tasks. But while ignorance may be bliss, aspiring DVD authors can't do competent commercial work without a working understanding of the encoding process. What's really happening behind the scenes, and what do you need to know about encoding to produce top-quality results?"
Colleen Kelly of emedialive.com has a point in that entry level DVD authoring tools allow beginners to create DVDs quite trivially. However, these tools abstract away most of the technical details and understanding from the user, perhaps hurting those beginners that aspire to become professionals in the field because they never learn the true software process that is involved. Therefore, she writes this article explaining some of the ins-and-outs of these pieces of software, and how DVD encoding and compression works.