detail information

DVD:

Now it's time to look at the DVD section.

Copy DVD

As the Copy DVD button brings up the Disc Copier program as does the Copy Audio CD and Copy Data Disc, these will be combined and reviewed together in the Applications section under Disc Copier.

Create New DVD

Now it's time to create a DVD data disc.

Creator Classic was opened for this task. This application supports all CDR formats as well at Single and Double layer DVD authoring.

For this test 4.3 Gigabytes of data files were drag and dropped into the compilation. The application checks the files as they are added to make sure the files are compliant and warns if any problem files are encountered.

Once all the files were added, clicking on the burn icon launches the 'burn dialog" as seen in the screenshot below. Here you can choose the recording drive and burn speed. You can also choose to leave the disc open so further sessions can be added at a later time, or close the disc after burning.

Creator Classic is a powerful application and it is possible for the experienced user to create just about any type of disc imaginable. It also offers enough of a helping hand to the novice user, so they too can be creating there own DVD discs in minutes. Once again the application worked flawlessly 

Plug & Burn

Now it's time to take a look at the Plug & Burn wizard.

The Plug & Burn wizard basically turns your PC and DVD burner into a real-time DVD recorder, providing you have a capture card in your PC.

I'm lucky enough to have an ATI All In Wonder Card fitted to my PC which also has a built in TV tuner. Using the Plug & Burn wizard allows live TV feeds to be captured and burned to DVD or VCD in real-time. For this test the DVD format was chosen.

Starting the wizard opens the capture dialog. Here you can choose your input. For this test the TV tuner was selected, and a blank DVD-R inserted into the burner. You can also choose the quality of the recording. For this test Best was chosen which gives approximately 1 hour of recording. The capture option was then selected. This started the capturing the live TV feed and in a few seconds the burner started to write to the blank DVD-R

1 hour later and the disc almost full, the capture was stopped.

Once the capture was stopped the wizard then created a DVD menu and finalised the disc

Below is a screenshot captured from the resulting DVD-Video

The resulting disc was then checked on my set top player and played flawlessly. The disc was then checked on my PC and again played without any problems.

When I first seen this application was included in the package, I was a bit sceptical that this could work. Let us look at what has to go on in the background for a real-time capture/burn.

⋅         The input stream has to be captured.

⋅         The captured data has to be processed into a MPEG2 data stream for DVD Video compliance.

⋅         The data has to be cached onto the hard drive.

⋅         All of this has to be authored and burned onto a DVD media.

⋅         Finally all of this has to happen in real-time.

The results were impressive. At no time during this test did I ever feel my PC was being stretched to its limits.

If you have a capture card with built in TV tuner, I can see this wizard being very useful indeed. Even if you don't have a TV card an alternative input could be selected and perhaps capture and burn some of you're favourite VHS tapes.

DivX-To-DVD Creator

As the title suggests, this application is used to convert DivX video clips to DVD-VIDEO compliant DVD's

The application is launched from the main Roxio Media Creator screen.

Once the application is running you can choose one DivX video clip or several clips.

For this test one clip was chosen. (see screenshot below)

You now choose where you want your DVD-VIDEO stored on your hard drive. You can also choose at this time to burn the DVD or burn it later using a different burning application.

For this test the default 'Burn with disc copier" was chosen.

Once DivX To DVD Creator had finished preparing the files, the Disc Copier dialog appears.

From here it's a simple matter of inserting a blank DVD media and clicking the burn icon.

The Application section is next