I had some old home movies transferred to a DVD by a company called Home Movie Depot. That DVD plays fine, but (as might be expected) the movies have bad footage of various kinds that I want to remove, and I want to reorder some of the scenes. My first thought was to import the .vob files into MyDVD, but that didn't work.

I then decided to capture the video on the DVD by hooking up my standalone DVD player to my Adaptec Videoh! DVD capture device and using MyDVD to import the video. That seemed to work; I created about 10 MPEG clips ranging from 30 to over 500 MB. These seem to play fine on Windows Media Player. I presume they are MPEG2, although I can't figure out how to tell for sure.

Next, I used the editing feature of MyDVD to create scenes within each clip, and "deleted" the bad footage. (I think MyDVD doesn't actually edit the MPEGs, but just identifies the start and stop frames for each section and whether to transcribe the section for the final DVD.) The results usually looked OK in the Preview feature of MyDVD, although sometimes a scene would freeze, and the video would resume only after that scene was over. By trying different cut points for the scene, I could usually eliminate the freezing. I also added background music successfully; it doesn't seem to affect the freezing.

So far so good? It seemed as if all I needed to do to be finished was to burn the edited scenes to a DVD, along with the menu system. But I can't seem to do so reliably. I always get the "DVD Created Successfully" finish screen, and the resulting disk always plays to some degree, but I always have at least one frozen scene on the finished product. In one case, I tried burning the DVD twice from the same starting setup, and different scenes froze on the two disks. Usually, the freezing occurs within the larger MPEG files.

The Sonic forum suggests that such problems might be encountered if other programs are running, if the screensaver or power saving features are not turned off, if the hard disk is fragmented, or if the files to be used for the DVD are not all in the same high-level directory (but not why). I tried most of these changes with no discernible difference.

From this site, I know that some people really hate My DVD, although usually for other reasons. I have used it to create a functional DVD with a slide show and video captured from a VHS tape recorder. And I know that Sonic does not provide good tech support.

Although I am willing to buy a different authoring program, I don't want to spend a large amount, because I will probably never do a lot of authoring, and would be better off sending the original Home Movie Depot product off to an expert.

Any advice would be appreciated.