| User review:
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If you looking for a quick and easy way to convert your AVIs, MKVs, or whatever over to DVD this is not your program. Stick with version 2 for that. If you want to convert your whatever to DVD and have the menus appear with all kinds of glitzy bells and whistles and have plenty of spare time and patience on your hands then perhaps ConvertXToDVD 3 is the program for you.
Let's start off with quality of resulting picture. As with any converter it's a case of garbage in, garbage out. For the most part with CXD 3 (as with CXD 2) if you feed it a quality source file, it will produce excellent results in a relatively short amount of time. I can happily say that I have not experienced any sync problems in any of the disks I've made. All in all I am extremely happy with the conversion.
Where I think the program fails to deliver is with the supposed new and improved menu system that can be placed on the DVDs. Firstly, I'm not a big fan of glitzy menus to begin with and so maybe my remarks here are going to be bias against them. But I do see a place for them on occasion and with that in mind I tested them out. In two words, "overly complicated" to achieve. The first problem with the system is that you are stuck with 30 menu templates that VSO has made up. You can't design your own yet. They promise a template editor sometime in the future. Even the most simple feature like changing the font or moving the Title a little over to the left or whatever is not available to you. Actually the Text Style editor is there. It just doesn't work yet. You can make all the changes you want but it just doesn't do anything yet.
You are able to change the Title and Root menu text content itself and change the background video, picture, and audio. With some templates you can add in audio and video to the chapter icon displays. You can choose your source various ways including choosing the exact time segment of audio and video (can be separate)from the rendered video you produced or even an outside source. All these options make for a lot of work for you to enter in CXD's poorly designed tree-based option entry system. And finally the worst part is that after entering everything in, you have no way of knowing whether you have it right. The program has no preview to show you what you entered will look like. It took me half and hour to enter in all the information for a 3 titleset DVD and then I had to wait 2 hours for it to render before I was able to discover that the menus didn't turn out the way I had intended them to turn out.
In summary, if you want easily produced quality DVDs with simple menus, stick with ConvertXtoDVD 2. If you want quality DVDs with glitzy menus and are willing to put up with a lot of crap in order to get it, get this program. |
