DVD Authoring performance tests:

For these tests we used one MPEG 2 file of approximately 4 Gigabytes in size and one DivX file of approximately 700 megabytes in size and built a DVD compliant file set onto our review PC’s hard drive for each of our input formats.

MPEG2 to DVD test:

Our MPEG2 file was authored in 1 hour 6 minutes and 34 seconds.

DivX to DVD test:

Our DivX file was authored in 46 minutes and 25 seconds.

DivX Authoring and performance tests:

For this test we used one DivX file of approximately 700 megabytes in size and built a compliant DivX file with a menu structure.

From the source window we were able to add our file.

Using the chapter tool we added 20 chapters for testing purposes.

The menu structure was set at “Automatic” for our tests.

In the above screenshot we can see 3 menu pages have been created containing links to our 20 chapters.

In the above screenshot we can see our created menu displayed.

And in the above screenshot we finally have the links editor to allow us to manually edit the links to our chapters.

Now we tested our created “DivX with menu structure” in the simulation to make sure everything functioned as it should. The created menu system worked well and finding our created chapters was easy.

As a final test, we played the actual movie. The resulting quality was very good indeed and playback was flawless.

Our file was now ready to render and encode into a DivX file with a menu structure. As we can see from the above screenshot, our DivX file was rendered in 51 minutes and 6 seconds.

DVD Burning Tool:

In this test we wrote our authored DVD file set onto a single layer DVD+R media.

In the above screenshot we can see we are able to select our target drive and burning speed.

In the above screenshot, we can see our file set was built in 12 minutes and 41 seconds.

In the above screenshot we can see our disc image was created ready for burning to our DVD+R media in 3 minutes and 1 second.

Above we can see our disc was successfully burned at maximum speed (18x) but was burned much slower than expected, it took 12 minutes and 41 seconds to be exact. It should have been under 6 minutes with this drive. We tried to burn another disc, the result is below.

Once again we selected maximum burn speed (18x) and the disc was burned successfully, but once again very slowly. This time we watched the burn progress. At around 40% of the burn, the buffer was empty and the burning drive slowed down because of this. Clearly something is wrong with this tools buffer setting on Windows Vista (we were not able to test this under Windows XP). However we did check the file set could be burned with another burning application and this time we had no speed issues.

Set top player test:

We played our resulting DVD on various set top DVD players to check for compatibility and quality. The disc played without any issues and the picture and sound quality was excellent.

This concludes our TMPGEnc DVD Author 3 review.

Program run through

Conclusion