| User review:
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I just got the October 1st 2.0.1.9 demo release of this program, and let me start out by saying that I only tried it once for a DVD I needed *quickly* authored. That said, i'm not sure if its that the errors listed in the comments on site have been fixed, my running win2k, or a combo of the two, but I have not had any of the crashing problems that anyone else has been speaking of.
Good - Clean interface, easy to use. I added preencoded mpeg2 video and had a classy looking menu system with bg pictures and sound down in 20 minutes tops. Everything was smooth, and the program has many features that other "ease of use" apps such as Ulead dvd moviefactory 2 didn't. Good stuff right up to the authoring..
Bad - at which time it hit me with a 10 hour Estimated Time to Completion as it "transcoded" (read: reencoded) the video that was already dvd standard 720x480 mpeg2. Now i'm not sure what exactly it felt it had to do to the video, but another program that simply takes the mpeg streams and joins them looked pretty sweet after that. I gave the video a once over, and quality looked pretty much the same, though there was an annoying 1 pixel wide bar of crap at the right side for no apperant reason... that is not cool in my books. I can't begin to imagine why that happened. I later tried it with another program that simply merged the streams and found no such problem.
Conclusion - If you want ease of use, there are easier; if you want speed, this is NOT the one to go to, as it reencodes the video regardless of format. This program looses the only function I personally would want it for - a speedy menu driven dvd or svcd - by that damned reencode. I would only recommend this to a beginner dvd author who doesn't mind a high wait for a more than functional dvd. |
