I have had great success with DVD Complete. I encode to elementary streams in VV, and then bring the .m2v and .mpa files into DVD Complete. No re-encoding of the video required, although I do re-encode the audio into PCM (I could easily render to PCM directly from VV if I wanted to, but I'm not an audiophile, so I don't really notice any difference). DVD Comlete has motion menus and backgrounds, and user settable chapter points.

The only down-sides are the limited audio (PCM or MPEGII only) and a fairly structured menu generation system. The up-side - $99.

Make sure you're encoding with the Main Concept DVD-NTSC template, not the "default". The default encodes audio at 44,100 hz and this would cause MyDVD to reencode up to 48,000.

I render from VV using the NTSC DVD MPEG-2 template, and the wav template (which I modified to 48KHz). If I use these two files, MyDVD doesn't re-encode them. However, I think MyDVD does show a brief "transcoding" phase - usually only for about 30-60 seconds. It must just be scanning the files for compliance since it certainly can't be encoding them this quickly.

By the way, Sonic Solutions has said the the new DVDit! 5.0 will be out in March. A new version of MyDVD should be right on its heels. DVDit! seems to match up closly with the DVD Architect. I kind of the like the Sonic Solutions DVD Applications except that they are VERY buggy. It seems like they were rushed out the door. I have found many (maybe 25) different issues that should have been easily caught during testing.

I have used MYDVD 3.0 and 4.0 and currently use REEL DVD. Using the default
settings on the MC codec and set for the separate audio and video streams 4.0
worked very well and did not transcode the video. My guru buddy was using the
MC cheapo version and could not stop the 4.0 from re-encoding. (Video Factory)
After many tests (8 discs) I found no differece in video quality between 4.0
and REEL DVD. For ($600.00 more for REEL DVD)you get Dolby AC-3 encoding
and 16 x 9 capability plus you get to buy Adobe Photshop LE to do buttons.
By the way MYDVD 4.0 uses the Main Concept codec to capture and re-encode.
If you can get MYDVD 4.0 to work it works very well. Like the Sonic Solutions
CEO says."Just press three buttons and your done". HO'HO'HO'

James J. Kizak

I've completely given up on MyDVD, after putting it through its paces for about two weeks. In fact, I never did get it to burn a good disc because I kept getting the weirdest error messages -- and never the same message twice. Even worse, not a single one of these messages is referenced on their web site.

Let's face it, MyDVD is crap. It's horribly buggy, poorly designed, grossly under-documented, hangs for long periods without telling you what it's doing, gives bad messages, has ZERO support. I could go on and on. It is seriously putrid software from a seriously unprofessional software company. Really. I don't know about their next step up (DVDIt?), but I wouldn't pay one thin dime for it given the sorry nature of this entry-level product.

Of course, you get what you pay for. And that's what really pisses me off. People say that MyDVD was free, but I paid for a drive (HP dvd200i) which was advertised to have all the necessary software to author and burn DVDs. It does not, and I have taken this up with HP and Best Buy. (Not that I expect to get anywhere, of course. It just feels good. I'm a professional and know when I've been ripped off. In truth, I'm not one bit surprised that the bundled software was crap, and I had budgeted to buy additional software anyway. But there are lots of hobbyists buying DVD burners without a clue that they will have to spend more money just to get the thing to work reasonably. They will probably think, "It's just me. I can't figure out how to get it to work." That is not right. OK, enough sermon. Amen.)

In case you have no alternative, here's what I ended up doing while pondering my long-term solution (and evaluating every product I could get my hands on):

1. Capture to AVI using the SF capture utility.

2. Either edit and render in Vegas, or convert to MPEG directly using SF Batch Converter (being sure to use the DVD NTSC template in either case, and modifying ONLY the picture quality slider and bit rate parameters in order to fit more video on a disc).

3. Author using MyDVD. Just drop the MPEGs into the program and let it churn, then rename the buttons it creates if you need to. (For appearance, I used the "Slate" template because it was the least offensive, then replaced its background with my own JPG created in a different app. The templates are found in \MyDVD\Styles\NTSC\Default Styles. Just save your JPG with the same name as the style background file and MyDVD will blindly use it.)

4. Create DVD to Hard Disk. As long as you used the DVD NTSC template to create your MPEGs, MyDVD will not reencode them. (Trying to create directly to disc bombed out every time just as it was about to complete, usually with a message that began "Couldn't complete the last command because...". I still have no clue what these messages mean, and the discs sometimes worked, but I don't trust them.)

5. Burn the AUDIO_TS and VIDEO_TS folders and their contents to disc using Nero. This is all you need to create a DVD which will play in any player (depending on media compatibility, of course).

The finished discs have one drawback which you might not discover right away, and is mentioned but buried pretty deeply on the MyDVD web site: Users can select any chapter from the menu, and the program will play from there to the end. But once the video is playing it is not always possible to skip forward/backward to the next chapter. To skip to another chapter, users may have to exit to the menu and select the chapter they want. Of course, this does not happen on EVERY disc, but it is a POSSIBILITY on every disc you create. There is no official way to know if it will happen until you create the disc and test it, although I found that by looking into the VIDEO_TS folder, I could usually predict when it would happen by comparing the VOB file sizes to my original MPEG file sizes. If the VOB files are in the same order in the folder as on the menu, all is well. If not, you will get problems on the finished disc. They "acknowledge this to be an issue" with their software. (It is to laugh!!)

This brings me to my recommendation for you:

1. Dump MyDVD and write a letter to the company which made your drive and the place where you bought it. Tell them you paid for something that you didn't get.

2. Download Nero (www.nero.com). It comes with a little app called NeroVision which, while simple, is far more flexible than MyDVD, and about a million times more stable.

3. Get ready to purchase SF's DVD Architect when it is released. After playing with the beta version, it's clear that this app is leaps and bounds ahead of all the entry-level authoring packages.

Hope this helps.

Rick
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