I wanted a little more in my DVD authoring program so I bought DVDiT (at half price) for $150. I wanted the ability to encode to AC-3 audio and I wanted to get around the silly .vob file sizes that DVD Architect Studio seems to make. I have to re-author my VIDEO_TS folders with DVD-Shrink to avoid the Nero "reallocation of files failed" error with TS folders made by DVD AS.

At the moment, however, DVDiT seems to be useless to me. Problem is, when I render to mpg OR avi (tried several versions of each in "advanced render") DVDiT says the files are non DVD compliant. Furthermore (and this is probably a different problem altogether) Sonic DVDiT tells me I am missing codecs and displays nothing but a green screen. The files play fine in Windows Media Player with the exception of any uncompressed.avi files. They play with a NASTY stutter. For example, with an avi file I created from a .vob with VirtualDub Video Inspector gives me a thumbs down on the video codec and says I need a DIB codec? Isn't that already included with XP? What codec should I install. I have the Gordian Knot pack.

I can play "DV-AVI" files I brought in from my DIgiCam in any program. These were imported using MS. Apparently these are using the Sony codecs. These same "DV-AVI" files, however, can NOT be imported into Sonic's program either! Once again, it complains about the lack of Codecs.

Is it just me or does it seem that Sony MS/VF only wants to place nice with itself? I don't want the hassle of re-saving the output of MS just to use it somewhere else. Any ideas?!?!?!