Thanks. I did check that, but I didn't see the info you mention on Dazzle. I have heard from some that Dazzle is VERY unstable.

I think DMF is fine, but I sure wish it supported motion menus. :)

Jim

Jim, just an fyi. I've been running DVD Complete for several months on an XP machine and have never had a crash. Good luck with whatever you choose.

Thanks. I've downloaded a demo of DVD Complete and will check it out.

Jim

I recommend Ulead DVD Workshop. You can find the SE version bundled with different hardware--ADS Pyro card for about $110 is one of them.

The full version of DVD Workshop is $279. The SE version limits motion menus to 10 seconds, and you can only have 20 chapter points. There are a few other limitations as well.

My favorite "feature" of DVD Workshop is the AC3 backdoor. If you mux your M2V and AC3 files together, you can use this MPEG2/AC3 file in DVD Workshop. You won't be able to preview the audio during your authoring phase, but your finished DVD will be AC3. :)

Oh yeah, for those of you looking for a free AC3 encoder, just do a search for BeSweet--but don't bother with the GUI frontend...you can do more with the command line.

Craig

Thanks. DVD Workshop is pretty sweet, but I am just going to be using this tool for authoring menus. I've already got firewire everywhere, so paying almost $300 is out of the picture. Besides, I'd rather spend the cash on upgrading to Vegas Video! :)

Thanks all.

Jim

Hi Jimco

DVD-Complete from Dazzle has worked very well for me.

-Mike

I tried that yesterday. It seemed that it converted video to a proprietary format when I imported it. I pulled in an MPEG1 encoded video that I made for a VCD. I then tried to create a motion menu for it, but the motion menu wouldn't accept MPG or AVI files. It would only take M1V or whatever the format was that DVD Complete was using. I used one of the sample videos included for my motion menu, but the preview would never work right. I couldn't get the video background to work. It looked like it was starting about 1500 frames into the video instead of at the beginning.

I got pretty frustrated with it and just gave up. Likely user error, but I didn't find it very intuitive.

I do appreciate the recommendation. Maybe I'll take a longer look sometime.

Jim

I purchased Movie Factory last month after trying several other low-end DVD authoring programs, such as neoDVD and MyDVD, which came bundled with my HP DVD100i burner.

While limited in certain areas and sometimes a little unstable, my experience has been that Movie Factory does an excellent job authoring DVDs. It is the only low end program that will directly use MPEG-2 files generated from TMPGEnc without first re-rendering them. With MyDVD, even when I know the files were rendered in a MPEG-2 compliant format, the program would ALWAYS re-render the audio portion of the files.

Also, Movie Factory has ALWAYS worked flawlessly with variable bit rate (VBR) MPEG-2 files generated from TMPGEnc. With MyDVD, the audio would regularly be lost about 3/4 of the way through the DVD burn -- very frustrating.

Some of the down sides of Movie Factory are: 1) the menus are "hardcoded" and can't be user customized (which is typical for the low end versions) other than changing the text of the captions and the font color of the text; 2) the number of provided menu templates is fairly limited (very few sports-oriented menus, which are what I'm mostly interested in) and 3) when creating chapters, the program will frequently crash, so you have to frequently save the project to avoid losing your work

But, for $43, I think Movie Factory is hard to beat. It's too bad there isn't a version somewhere between MF and DVD Workshop, say around $100 that would offer more menu customization options that are found only in DVD Workshop. But, $300 is a lot to spend just for home use.

Remember that you can substitute your own background images for the templates', and even add your own background music, select whatever frame you want for your thumbnail, and even add an intro video. So the templates really only limit you to the number and location of chapters on each menu page. The amount of text for each thumbnail remains limited, and you can't do motion menus of course, but if you want more templates, you can download some for free from:

http://www.ulead.com/dmf/free.htm

Hope this helps!:)

Yup - MF for me! It's simple, quick and reliable - And thank you again p_l for suggesting it some months back. Ooooh those cheesy menus! More Gouda than Holland!

Grazie

Ps for p_l - love your strategy with the "New Citadel" on the Dark Side. Larf?!? I thought I'd split me sides! Keep it up mate.

MovieFactory is even a better deal because I just received an e-mail from Ulead that they lowered the price to $24.95. You can't beat that!

What!!! I just bought it yesterday and paid $45 for it! Geez. :(

Jim