
MyDVD 9 Studio
|  | $43.52Availability: Out of Stock Condition: NewSKU: 231300 UPC: 815227007363 Ships in 2-3 business days |
| Customer ReviewsReviewed on 2007-12-08      junk I've made a number of DVDs in the past w/ MyDVD...part of the roxio suite. They all suck. I create Uber slideshows w/ music in Adobe After Effects (for those who might now be familier, AE is PRO level software w/ a PRO level price and a steep learning curve, but is Pro enough to see it's work in A list movies). I was in a hurry and roxio was at hand. I can figure out complex software w/o a manual. This "stupified" drek gave me fits trying to accomplish the simplist thing. Move a menu button? It says click and drag. I could not make this happen. Change a button? Where is the "change button" selection? Remove cheesy background? Not possible, I suppose, unless you create your own black background and change to that. "Help" is no help if the interface does not contain the items referenced. Who allows this stuff to get published? Look online for free or trialware DVD authors instead. I've tried a few and they are WAY better than "Roxio". Roxio is crapware. |  | Reviewed on 2007-08-04      Terrible This product took an hour to install on my fast gaming PC, and then I could not get it to work. I updated my DVD drive firmware, graphics card drivers, etc., as suggested by Roxio, no dice. What a terrible piece of non-working bloatware.
Then I tried Nero 7, which installed in about 10 minutes and worked perfectly out of the box.
|  | Reviewed on 2007-06-11      This program sucks! My computer met ALL requirements to run this program. This program made my computer crash causing me to lose some valuable information, which I was lucky to get from a few sources. When finally installed and working, it took almost 8 hours to burn a 2 hour DVD, and this was after the editing. And after the 8 hour burn, the DVD didn't work properly on my DVD player. I wasted good money on this product only to be disappointed. I don't think I am the only one. |  | Reviewed on 2007-05-13      MyDVD 9 Studio This was a gift for my wife and she loves it. |  | Reviewed on 2006-12-29      MyDVD was once great software, now it's the usual Roxio junk This product is among the worst products I have ever used. The software is buggy, extremely fussy, and produces incompatible DVD's. I've tried this on three different Windows XP Pro computers, ranging from my home PC to my work laptop. All had similar problems.
I purchased this product because of the extremely positive experiences I had with Sonic MyDVD 6; that product was the easiest to use and most feature rich product in its price class. I expected the same from this product.
Pros:
* 16:9 widescreen support
* Customizable menus
* Many tools can be accessed outside of MyDVD
* Cheap
Cons:
* Very buggy and crashes a lot
* DVD's are not compliant
* Poor compatibility with DVD writers
* Extremely slow at generating/encoding DVD's
I purchased Roxio MyDVD 9 to produce a three 40 photo slideshows and drop in 3 movie clips from my Canon camera. The main selling points of MyDVD 9 Premiere were wide-screen support, Pan & Zoom Effects for slideshows, and customizable menus.
I spent over 4 hours trying to setup a single 50 picture slideshow; it allows you to crop photos using its built-in wizard. Unfortunately, the software would freeze up after 10 crops and required me to force quit the software (losing my crops). The work around was to crop 7-9 photos, save the project, quit, and then start over. Each time I did this, I lost about 5 minutes waiting for MyDVD to load, and then the slideshow wizard to load.
The Pan Zoom Effects are mostly automated and cannot really be customized. Plus, when using PZE, it refused to put chapter marks to each photo. That means you have to fast-forward through the entire slideshow to get to a particular photo, or rewind to go back a photo. Very irritating.
Titles and text annotations on slideshows (i.e. a title screen) refused to save on 2 of my 3 computers. Project files would not safely copy from one computer to the next.
When it came time to add the movies, it added 1 of the movies just fine, adding the vertical letterbox to the 4:3 video for display on 16:9. The second movie it "stretched" to 16:9 even though the movie was 4:3. And the last movie it refused to add, claiming it was not a valid movie file. All three files were pulled from the camera unmodified and play just fine in WMP and Quicktime. I ended up using Quicktime to reconvert the movie to another format before MyDVD would accept them.
When it came time to burn the DVD, it gave me cryptic error messages. Their online help system did not have any info on the error messages and live customer support was closed around Christmas. I eventually found some forum recommendations that told me to apply a seemingly unrelated hotfix. That fixed the problems on one of my computers (other 2 kept getting the same errors).
I had to burn the DVD three times before I got a sort-of-working DVD. Each time I tried to burn the DVD, I had to wait for MyDVD to re-create my DVD (30 minutes). Unlike MyDVD 6, MyDVD 9 is unable to re-use the results from a previous burn. So that means you blow the full 30 minutes on every attempt.
The DVD-writer software in MyDVD always burns at 0.33x speed despite clicking the 2x so 5 minutes of DVD content took over 15 minutes to burn. other DVD software is able to burn at full speed.
The first attempt resulted in an empty DVD. Neither my PC nor DVD player could see any content on the DVD. Desperate and running out of time for Christmas dinner, I tried burning it again. I waiting another 45 minutes and ended up with a seemingly valid DVD; try to play it on my computer and DVD player--neither recognize it as a valid DVD (depsite having the Video_TS folder + VOB's).
I encoding again, this time to a "folder" instead of a DVD-R (another 30 minutes). I manually burned that folder to a DVD-R using Nero; Nero complained about the DVD-VIDEO folder being non-compliant, but I could not see anything wrong with it. Burned it anyway and ended up with a DVD that'll play on some Windows XP machines, but not on any Sony/Pioneer/Toshiba DVD players. It did play on my $25 Memorex blue-light special. All of these DVD's players have read DVD-R's produced by prior versions of MyDVD.
All subsequent attempts continue to produce non-compliant DVD-Videos that will only play on a few DVD players. Still haven't figured out what's not compliant about this DVD.
The icing on the cake was when I eventually got the DVD to play. The menu items were out of order. When I pressed "down" on my DVD remote to advance to the next menu item, it would jump around to random items. Even though the menu items visually showed it in order, the "down" buttom would jump from 1 to 6 to 3 to 2 to 5 to 4, etc.
Do not buy this software! My recommendation, find one that has a downloadable demo. My guess, Roxio discontinued Sonic MyDVD and rebranded some horrible Roxio product as MyDVD. |  |
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