| User review:
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This is a great tool that really works. It fullfills my needs of archiving MPEG4-encoded TV programs onto regular DVDs almost perfectly.
Back in 2005, I built by own Linux-based DVR system and installed it in Japan. Since then the system has been recording about 20 hours of various TV programs broadcast there each week and sending them over the Internet to my home server in San Jose, CA for allowing us to watch them on a 50-inch LCD-RPTV sitting on a couch.
Although we generally watch a program then erase it immediately, we have kept some programs for watching them again in the future. These archived prgrams are now filling up our server's storage space (currently about 250GB out of 350GB). So I have been looking for a tool to archive these programs onto DVDs easily.
Here's the spec of the archived files:
File format: MPEG4 in AVI
Codec: DivX-compatible (ffmepg), transcoded from hardware-encoded MPEG2
Bit rates: 2000kbps (video), 128kbps (audio), about 900MB/hour
Video format: NTSC (4:3)
Frame rate: 29.97
Resolution: 640x480
Quality: no worse than good VHS
I tried the trial version of the tool that superimposes a "This is a trial version" message. The tool was very easy to use. Firsly, I was surprised how fast it imported source AVI files; I imported 2 1-hour files (about 900MB each) and it took only a few secods per file, whereas similar other tools may spend a few minutes.
Next, the tools offers the best flexibility in building the main menu. Most similar DVD creation tools simply use the file name as the title selection entry text, but this tools is different; it not only allows to enter arbitraty text but also to change the text fonts and text script. This tremendously helps me because I can use original Japanese language text for title menu entries instead of machine-generated numeral-only file names (my own play-back system uses separate metadata files for title and other information).
The completed DVD played back perfectly. It is remarkable that he tool correctly transcoded the 640x480 original resolution into DVD's 720x480 so that there's no distortion or cropping in the video. The video quality is virtually no different from the original MPEG4.
After watching the test DVD, I immediately decided to send money to unlock the license.
Here's my wish list about the tool:
- Simple program editor for removing commercial as well as trimming unncecessary preceding and tailing (noise) footage.
- Simple tool to set chapter marks at arbitrary points (the tools allow to set chapter marks in the manner of "every XX minutes if program is longer than YY minutes," which is still very practica and useful).
But even without the above features, I do admit this tools is very useful.
hiro |
