How to Add Chapters to a DVD in DVDStyler

Chapters divide a title into named jump points, exactly like the scene selections on a commercial DVD. Viewers can skip forward past an introduction, jump straight to the vows in a wedding video, or find a specific song in a concert recording. DVDStyler can insert chapters automatically at a fixed interval or let you place them manually at exact moments, and it can generate a chapter menu so viewers can pick a scene by name. This tutorial covers both methods. It assumes your video is already in a project — if not, begin with burn an MP4 to DVD.

Automatic chapters

Automatic chapters are the two-minute option and are good enough for most home projects:

1. Right-click the title and open its properties.
2. Find the chapter settings and choose automatic chapter generation.
3. Set the interval — every 5 minutes is a sensible default; use 10 minutes for long programs where you do not want dozens of stops.
4. Confirm and let DVDStyler place the chapter marks evenly along the title.

Evenly spaced chapters are easy to create but rarely land on scene boundaries. For anything you will hand to other people — a family event, a school play — manual chapters are worth the extra ten minutes.

Manual chapters

1. Play or scrub through the video and note the times where real scenes begin: the start of a speech, a new song, the moment the birthday candles appear. A list of times written down first makes the rest mechanical.
2. Open the title’s properties and switch the chapter mode to manual.
3. Add a chapter point for each time on your list, entering the time for each one.
4. Remember that the very beginning of the title (00:00) is always effectively the first chapter — you do not need to add it.

Keep the count reasonable. A 90-minute video with 8–15 chapters feels like a commercial disc; 60 chapters turns the chapter menu into a phone book.

Build a chapter menu

Chapter points alone let viewers skip with the remote’s next/previous buttons. A chapter menu goes further and gives them a screen of named choices:

1. Add a new menu to the project, or duplicate your main menu so the design matches (see create a DVD menu for the copy technique).
2. Add one button per chapter. Use thumbnail buttons if you want each button to show a frame from its scene, or text buttons labeled with the scene name: “Ceremony”, “Speeches”, “First dance”.
3. Double-click each button and set its action to play the title starting at that chapter. This is the step to double-check: buttons created quickly often all point at the start of the title.
4. On the main menu, set one button (“Scene selection” or “Chapters”) to open this chapter menu, and make sure the chapter menu has a way back to the main menu.

Preview the navigation

Preview the project and behave like an impatient viewer: start the video, press Next to jump a chapter, jump back, then return to the menu and pick a middle chapter from the chapter screen. Confirm each jump lands at the scene you intended. A chapter that lands a few seconds early is a small thing in a home movie and a real annoyance in a music recording, where you probably want the mark right at the downbeat.

Troubleshooting notes

If chapter menus appear but their buttons all start the video from the beginning, the button actions were never set per-chapter — revisit the step above. If the whole menu is unresponsive in a player, the problem is bigger than chapters: see menu buttons not working. All of our walkthroughs are collected in the tutorials hub, and DVDStyler itself is available from the download page.