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Disc Utilities - Part 1

Besides the editing and creation applications offers CyberLink a bunch of more or less useful little tools in this software. Reason enough for us to look into their functionality.

Erase disc:

While we have seen this tool included a few times in other applications, the company added the tool into this section of the software as well.

The interface of this tool provides us with all the necessary information required; it is easy to understand and to use. The erasing process starts after the erasing method is chosen and the go button is clicked.

It takes less than 1 min to do a quick format and app. 13 min to format the whole disc.

Copy Disc:

The next useful tool in this collection enables us to copy our content with PowerProducer created or any other non-CSS protected disc.

We see again a well-organized interface with detailed information about the inserted discs and there is not much to do to copy a disc.

There are only a few settings which should be done after selecting source and target drive. All we have to do is to set the recoding speed, the number of copies and we have to choose if the disc should be copied on the fly or if the software should create a disc image on the hard disc of the PC.

The copy process itself runs smooth, without any problems and requires not more or less time than other applications.

Defragment Disc:

An interesting tool with doubtful usefulness. Anyway, the tool should work similar to the defragment tool, which we all know from Windows. The only difference is that this tool works with DVD+/-RW discs.

The only problem we had is that we haven't found a disc to defragment. After analysing the disc we always saw the message that there is no need to defragment the disc and this hasn't changed after a disc has been edited more than 10 times. So you see that there was no chance for us to test this tool.

Make compatible:

Like the name of this tool promises, it should help us to make a DVD-VR compatible for playback on any standalone DVD-players. PowerProducer manages this by converting the DVD-VR disc to DVD-video format.

This is again a very easy procedure. The tool provides us with important information, such as disc capacity and data size from the disc, inserted into the source drive and the necessary information about the disc, which is in the target drive.

Before we click onto the start button we just need to decide if we want to keep the DVD folder, the number of copies and the recording speed.

One little problem we have found here is related to the recording speed settings. The software is only showing the available recording speed for the inserted media and we are only able to select the speed before the whole process starts. This means that there is no chance for us to set the recording speed to a higher value when source and target drive are the same.