Software nightmare

[Digitizer]

I just got myself the one and only Pioneer DVRA04 and I am finding out that the DVD software market is still budding - I have not seen a single authoring/burning title that can actually be useful and enjoyable to use.
The trouble started with the bundled MyDVD, which is probably the worst piece of software I have tried in a long time. I actually shelled out hundreds of dollars for a product that includes this insulting program that cannot go between menu pages during the design time. It can not let you rearrange menu items, delete custom presets, add custom buttons, and, last but not least, MyDVD refused to burn on a writer it came with! Oh, yeah, those gray labels stick out into the white background on the loading screen. Sonic, in its style, creates slick-looking products that are impossible to use. They charge $80 for this too?!
The fact that many rewritables come bundled with this title says it all.


Now, Ulead. Movie Factory - I have yet to find a format that it can accept. It reads file extensions, not file headers. So it does not know that an mpeg is an mpeg if the file has no proper extension. Someone has to go learn Windows programming.

DVD Workshop is a special case. It offers an overwhelming amount of options, a power user's dream. But when I pressed the FINISH button, it was pretty much, eh, finished. It turns out that Ulead forgot to look up the DVD specs before making this program. 352x240 MPEG1 does not have to be re-encoded? Hello? It is a standard? Anybody there?

Bottom line is: there is not one (not that I know of) developer that knows what users really want and the DVD software market is essentially vacant because there is no leader yet in this area - the current products only perform 50% at best while costing a fortune.

As always in video, there will be a VirtualDub or TMPEG of DVD authoring, done by people who actually know what they are doing. It will be probably free too.

That's my rant

[SLK001]

Boy, do I hear you. The bundled software that came with my A04 is the largest piece of trash that I have ever seen (with the exception of PowerDVD 4.0 - which I already had). If I had to do this all over again, I would just order the DVR-104 OEM version of the thing and save the $50.

My quest has pretty much paralleled yours. My MyDVD never saw the light of day. I also have Sonic's DVDit SE which came with a capture card. It also is a piece of shit. Even tried DVDit PE... has some good features, but can't enter a proper chapter point to save its own ass. Then I happened upon SpruceUp. This program works well, but doesn't allow motion menus or sound in menus (so far, this is the best that I have tried). As for the Ulead crap... I found Movie Factory to also not be able to read anything that I feed it (this trial lasted less than 30 minutes before it got dumped). And their "pro" product, DVD Workshop, I found it to be "clunky" and very unstable (it would crash if I tried to put in chapter points too fast - ie, more than one a minute). I actually tried to make a DVD using WS, but their instructions on moving menus were non-existant and I also had to keep loading their program (and everything that I had done between the last save and the "crash"). So much so, that I finally "deep-six" the thing for good. I have heard good things about DVD Maestro and Scenarist, but I haven't gotten a chance to test them.

I hope that you are correct about some individual actually working on a decent DVD authoring program. I would gladly pay to get what I want - ie, motion menus with sound and static menus with sound and ACCURATE chapter setting.

My system is a 1.8GHz P4 running W2000P, two IBM 60GB HD on Primary IDE channel, the A04 as Master of the Secondary IDE channel (solo). All of my CDR/RW and DVD-ROM drives are on a SCSI bus.