WinDVD Creator 2 Platinum

Rating:
Summary: Waste of time and money
Review: I bought the plextor convertor bundled with this software. I get constant computer freezes and have to restart. I got an exchange and it does the same thing. Support from both intervideo and plextor did not help.

Rating:
Summary: Doesn't work
Review: I have used WINDVD Creator for about a year and decided to upgrade to WINDVD Creator 2 Platinum. I purchased from Amazon because of my experience purchasing many items and the excellent price. I received the product and installed it and it doesn't work. The program "crashes" when making a DVD. I have tried repeatedly to contact InterVideo and have not received a response. I now have a piece of software that doesn't work and can find no technical assistance.

Rating:
Summary: Works ok tons of little annoyances
Review: I wanted to create a slide show with music of my digital pictures. I used it to create a vcd and dvd of the same show. I had a poor experience using this program.

pro:
- I got a working dvd out of it and a marginally usable vcd.
- It was easy to understand.
- I could select when music could start and stop.
- It has a nice timeline view.
- The menu creator was easy to use and made a nice looking menu.
- Preview function so I could see what my project looked like. (Bug alert: if your images are smaller than the television screen size, you might see pieces of the picture that came before it on the right side of the screen. Thankfully, this doesn't happen when you actually burn the dvd or vcd.)

con:
- customized menus did not work in vcd format. I could eventually get the vcd to play, but chapters did not work. (menus do work in dvd)
- no way to rotate pictures while in the program. I had to rotate the pictures using another program then reimport them.
- There was an annoying click at the start of each music file I put in the slide show. The click is not in the original mp3s. I could get rid of it, but I had to do it by hand.
- The program attempts to be visual, so I couldn't enter an exact value, for example, a start time. Instead, I got to click little arrows up and down to try and get the number right.
- setting chapter marks was difficult. Sometimes I couldn't set one for no discernable reason.
- Program liked to crash while inserting music.

Rating:
Summary: home video tool
Review: In short - this is a very good product.
I tested all the features and created all the formats with various types of files and EVERYTHING WORKED AS SPECIFIED!
VCD quality is surprisingly good - a perfect solution to transfer old home videos. SVCD discs are really just a little bit short of a DVD quality, too bad chapters cannot be created in this format.
The best of all are various DVD formats - you can put half an hour content on one regular 700MB disc - amazing! This is just perfect for your home movie studio.
DVD formats are standard, one hour - high quality, 2h - standard quality on one 4.7 Gb disc. For transfer of AVI files from a DV camcoder, it is good to select one hour disc option.
Editing and authoring tools may seem a little bit complicated until you try them, and then, you must love them.
Advanced features can be used for other purposes, if you have time to play with it (sound editing, etc.)

The reason why not 5 stars is simply support - the staff that respond to calls has a limited knowledge of their own product and this may frustrate power users.

User's guide is ok, but that too, could have been done better.

Generally, this is a very good product and I recommend it to all who'd like to quickly create professional quality home DVD's.

Rating:
Summary: Very Bad Product
Review: Save your money, this product don't work. The input from my capture device is choppy and out of sync with audio. Support is worst than the product. would give it a lower rating, but this is the lowest I can give.

Rating:
Summary: Bad
Review: This program came bundled with my computer. It is pretty bad. It has limited features and I can't play DVD's on my JVC DVD Player recorded with this software. I tried DVD's and VCD's with programs like Showbiz 2 which is very good and with Movie Factory 3 and I can even play those in the play station 2. Also the video and sound skip a lot and it has pretty low quality. It was a major disappointment so I had to buy extra software. I Chose Movie Factory because it was cheaper, and of the same quality as showbiz,and also included burn now for recording data or music to disc. I even recorded some slide shows of my parent's recent trip to England on Movie Factory and they were very impressed. The program might work for you, but I wouldn't recomend it to any one, try the demos of other software you can download directly from the internet and then choose the one that works the best for you. Most video editing software offer free trials for up to a month.