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Converting The Movie:

Now it is on to the converting of the movie. To do this, all you have to do is to hit the Convert button. Once done, you should see the Convert button change to a Cancel button and a progress bar at the bottom will appear. Under here you will see the words Converting.

After a short period of time, under the progress bar the amount of time left will show up. This is a rough guide to how long it will take. You can also see at the very bottom of the screen, what frame it is currently on, how many frames per second it is doing and the average bitrate it is using.

Once the conversion has been done, it will automatically burn to the media in your drive. The following will appear if you haven't placed any media in the drive.

If you take a quick look in the working directory, you will see the following. The Original folder will contain your original media unaltered and a second folder called VIDEO_TS. This is where you new DVD movie is stored.

If you go into the VIDEO_TS folder you will see the DVD files that will be burnt to the DVD. These are standard VOB, IFO and BUP files found on all DVD's.

Once you start the burning of the movie, the progress bar will reset itself to let you know how long the burn will take. This will depend upon your burner and the speed rating of your media.

Once done, the main window will display the "Writing Successfully Completed" message at the bottom of the screen.

The DVD is now made. I played it on my DVD player and it looked just as good as the original DVD I backed it up from. Obviously the outputted movie will only be as good as your media files stored on your computer.

Here I now tried several other formats and resolutions to test the program out. All were of excellent quality and played back without any problems.

For the final test, I decided to try a mixture of different media's including DivX, XviD, WMA, MOV and normal AVI files to see how it performs. I also added enough so that it will have to go onto a DVD-9 disc to see how this performs.

Once again the encoding took some time, in total about 7 hours. The first set of media that I used which was RITEK-D01-001 failed to burn properly. It would start to burn but then fail to complete. This is known to be bad media so I moved on to some better quality media. The second lot was Mitsubishi Kagaku Media or MKM-001-000. This worked perfectly in my burner and I had my movie burned in about 25 minutes.

I once again played this on a stand-alone machine to see how it performed. The movies were all of very high quality and the disc played without problems.

The one thing here that I noticed, was the lack of a menu option so that you can skip to whatever movie you want to play easily. If you have only one movie on a disc this isn't noticeable, but when you have quite a few, then getting from one to another easily makes the menu option a must.

Lets take a quick look at the Positives and Negatives….