TMPGEnc DVD Author 1.5

Rating:
Summary: Incredibly bad licensing
Review: I would strongly suggest checking the manufacture's web site before buying this product. Some products possibly including this one require periodic license revalidation through the manufacturers web site. This is even worse than the Microsoft approach and this company does not have the resources to support such a system. If they go out of business you lose the use of the software. Next do we trust companies that continually send information from our computer without our knowledge. As consumers we must reject products that follow this approach or we can kiss any hope of privacy in the future world goodbye.


Rating:
Summary: This is the best authoring software (for some specific usage
Review: I've been using this program for over 6 months and it is an amazingly easy and reliable one. It has some limitations, especially the lack of support for multiple audio streams and for subtitles, but if you have a DVD-compliant encoded file for which you don't need subtitles or multiple audio this is the easiest and by far the best program. For the web version you can also buy a Dolby plug in that would allow reencoding of the audio (stereo AC3). I don't know if this is included in the boxed package. If it is not you could still make DVDs with Dolby sound but you won't be able to preview that. The Source Creator that it's included also has enough features to allow many uses. I think you would need to have the Dolby plug in installed to produce video with Dolby sound. But it's amazing that it will convert video downloaded from the web to a dvd compliant file, I even fit 10 hours of such video on a single DVD and the result looked much better on the big TV than on the computer! For the footage that I do on my videocamera I use other software that is much more expensive, but for whatever I record from tv on a DVDR I think this program is the best. You could also use it easily to convert VHS tapes if you have a capture software and hardware. Then cutting down the ads and making chapters and multiple menus with various options is a breeze. For an unclear reason the writing tool works extremely fast. (that is very good) The resulting DVDs work as they are suposed to. Also this is a very stable and mature product. Version 1.6 also suports writing on 8.5GB DVDs (this means that this version doesn't support that)

Rating:
Summary: reliable authoring tool
Review: I've tried many DVD authoring tools. I convert my home video to DVD-R using TMPGENC and TDA. I am very pleased with the quliaty compared to the corresponding Sonic products in this price range. What I especially like about TMPEGENC is that it can fit any length of movie to a DVD as long as you are willing to sacrifice quality. So far I've routinely put 2 hours or slightly more on a DVD with no quality problems. My only minor complaint about this product is that some of the wording is not the English words you would expect. The bottom line for me is that I have never had any issues with quality or compatibility using this product. If you want an easier product to use, use Sonic. If you want more control and better quality, use TMPEenc family of products.

Rating:
Summary: It Does What It's Meant to Do
Review: If you're unfamiliar with the process, here's what it takes to get your videos from camcorder to DVD:
1) Capture analog video (or transfer digital video) from camcorder to computer (usually as an AVI file).
2) Edit the footage to add titles, cut out boring stuff and white noise, correct color, adjust volume, etc.
3) Render (convert) the edited file (still AVI) as an MPG file.
4) Convert the MPG to the format the DVD player needs (e.g., IFO, NFO files).
5) Burn the files from step 4 to a DVD.

This software package will let you do #3 (DVD Source Creator), #4 (DVD Author), and #5 (DVD Writing Tool) above. You'll need something else for steps 1 & 2.

The whole DVD creating process is still a bit complicated for novices but after trying several other applications out there, this one has been the best for my needs. If you're a real novice and don't want to spend some time figuring things out by trial and error, you might be better off using Pinnacle Studio or another application that walks you through the whole process (with limited flexibility, though).

DVD Author has some pretty cool DVD menu options -- each chapter can have its own little 30-second (time is adjustable) preview, so when you put the DVD in your player the first thing that pops up is 6 (also adjustable) little TV screens showing you a moving preview of what's in each chapter on the DVD. There aren't a whole lot of templates (colors, buttons, etc.) but I'm satisfied with the default template anyway and you can design your own.

Another feature I like is that you can do some last-minute editing of MPG files before creating your DVD. This works great for all the home videos I'm doing. Example: I have a bunch of MPG files on my hard drive ("christmas 97.mpg", "birthday party.mpg"). With this tool, I can make a DVD for my mother-in-law where I cut "christmas 97.mpg" down to just the part where we're at her house. Then, without modifying the original MPG file, I can make another DVD for my brother with just the part of the video he's interested in. This saves a lot of time versus rendering a whole new file of just the footage I want in each DVD compilation.

This is good stuff. And at a great price. I highly recommend it.

Rating:
Summary: Questionable performance
Review: Purchased this product two months ago. When I encode digital video captured from my Sony video camera I get inconsistent results. Sometimes the encoding works and sometimes after 2 hours it just quits. I wrote to the company and they sort of indicated that I might need additional software (Their response is as nebulous and incomplete as the user manual supplied). Playing with the settings I observed that the encoding always took place if I checked a box titled "top field first". Now I get consistency but the video is jerky, quite noticeable when the camera pans. Quite disappointed.

Rating:
Summary: Only TMPG and CCE can handle it
Review: There are only two industry standard MPEG Encoders. Cinema Craft Encoder (CCE) and TMPGEnc [Please Note that this product is called TMPGEnc DVD author - It is not an encoder. It converts MPEG files into DVD files. TMPG offer a product on their web site that does MPEG encoding]. Anything else has inferior maths behind the encoding - essentially the quality can never be as good. TMPG products offer a bundle of conversion, burning, authoring solutions, but IMO CCE is best for converting to MPEG and TMPGEnc DVD author is best for making DVDs from those CCE MPEG files. In fact there is really no two ways about it. Both CCE and TMPG have this market dominated, except for the more expensive software packages that also use hardware/firmware for encoding, however the difference is barely noticeable with CCE and TMPG.

TMPG allows you to do anything when authoring a DVD except for adding subtitles - which is probably the most difficult thing you can do in DVD authoring. If you want to add subs to your DVD then I suggest using the software package D.I.K.O with this one.

Anyway the bottom line is that Hollywood produce their DVDs using software like TMPG and CCE. Although TMPG can give you some trouble on converting some MPEG files to DVD files this is usually to do with having the wrong video codecs installed on your machine or a bad encoding to begin with (a good reason to use CCE). If you can encode with CCE you should be able to author it with TMPG.

As a note there are two issues with TMPG. The first is that its licensing is subject to a renewable licence agreements with things like Dolby Digital (AC3), DTS and Dolby Surround so some additional plug-ins are required to have a full blown DVD authoring system at your command. Here is a hint. If you are afraid that this revalidation key is going to affect your work then just find a crack and patch it. It is easy to do but to be honest this company and CCE are the only 2 out there so it is unlikely they will go bust.

BTW - If you just want to copy DVDs then go use DVDshrink. Its free. You don't need this. This is used for building DVDs from Mpeg files. If you have a DV cam then use CCE for encoding your DV files to Mpeg and TMPG to author the DVD of the converted DV files. That is what it is all about.


Rating:
Summary: This program rocks
Review: This is a great program that is very simple to use. The only drawbacks that I've seen are there aren't very many menu background choices, and editing isn't any frame to any frame like the standalone recorder. That means perfect edits can only be done sometimes. There also isn't any way to join seperate clips together to make one clip, or if it does it I don't know how to do it. Other than that it's very simple to use and does an excellent job. Menus have plenty of options for setup, display main menu or track menu or both, or auto play instead of starting on a menu. What to do after each title can also be set, back to menu etc. Titles and chapters can be easily added. It's also pretty fast in it's functions, much faster and easier than Nero. Editing is very simple and fast, it uses a timeline which can be played at normal speed, fast speed, frame by frame, or scrolled through, very fast and simple to use compared to others I've seen. Preset menus can be used or you can customize the menus, which can come in very handy when making menus with with long titles. It does RAM, something that some far more expensive programs won't do. It won't write to RAM, but it will import from RAM. It also accepts and burns the AC3 audio that many standalones use, again something that many far more expensive programs don't do, or that they want to sell you a plug in to use. It can deal with the edit points on discs that were edited on the standalone too, some programs have audio sync problems with discs that were edited on standalones. It has it's own burner which works flawlessly every time. You can spend alot more and get alot less, it's worth every penny. After buying you can go to the websight and upgrade to version 1.6 which allows burning dual layered discs. If you are looking for a simple to use reliable program, this is it.