Updated 06/19/2005: Here’s parts 1 & 3 of this post.
I finally found some time over the weekend to create my first Thomas the Tank DVD using MyDVD. My son slept for 1 & ½ hours so I had plenty of time to play around with MyDVD and customize it to my liking. To start, I imported four Thomas and Friends episodes into MyDVD (this is where I ran into problems before). The import process created a thumbnail for each episode that it places on the menu. From this point, I could have just burned the movie to DVD. Instead, I decided to customize the menu so that it was a little more kid friendly.
Customization of the menu was extremely easy. I gave the menu a different background and I also used the Thomas and Friends theme song. Finally I added some text to the menu so that each episode had a title that was more meaningful. After customizing the menu, I began the LONG process of transcoding and burning the DVD.
(Click for larger image)
Before I get any further, let me start of by giving you some details on my computer. The computer I used to create the DVD is rather old. I’ve had it since college! It has a 800mhz Pentium 3 with 512mb ram. Needless to say, this machine is somewhat slow by today’s standards. As a matter of fact, my computer doesn’t even meet the minimum requirement for a machine running MyDVD. Even though it doesn’t meet the minimum requirements, the burn process still worked! All and all, it took my computer about 6 hours to transcode the DVD and record it to disc! During this time, MyDVD consumed 100% of my computer. Needless to say, I should have performed this task over night. From what I understand, this process takes a long time no matter what kind of computer you have. I wonder how long it would have taken if I had a 3 GHz machine? If anybody has experience with a better machine let me know. I’d be interested to find out how long it takes with a better computer.
In terms of the quality, I’m extremely happy with how well it looks on my TV as well as my computer. At first, I was a little concerned about the quality since I burned it using the “fit to DVD” feature in MyDVD. From what I understand, the “fit to DVD” feature changes the DVD quality so that it can fit the content onto a DVD. I used “fit to DVD” because I wanted to try to place at least four shows on one disc. The DVD has worked in every device that I’ve tried thus far!
Other then the hiccups I had with my initial installation, I am extremely happy with MyDVD thus far. The burning/transcoding process took rather long however, this is to be expected considering the fact that I have a somewhat slow computer. Next, I want to try editing a movie so that I can remove commercials. I didn’t have to do this with my Thomas DVD because Thomas and Friends does not have any commercials.
To sum it up, I would recommend MyDVD to anybody who wants to burn TiVo recordings to DVD. Even though I ran into installation problems, I am glad that I purchased this software. I only hope that I don’t run into this problem the next time I try and reinstall. Because of how long it took me to create this DVD, I am considering getting a new computer. Please let me know if you have any experience with how long it takes to transcode a DVD using a better pc.
I have a 2.4 Gh AMD machine, and I usually leave it running overnight to burn a DVD. I’d say 4-6 hours is about right for a 2-hour disc.
2.6 GHz Pentium 4 with 1GB RAM and I’d say that sounds about right.
Removing commercials is really pretty simple, I went through the painstaking trouble of doing it for the Rose Bowl and it was really pretty easy. The slider control could be more precise, it seemed to jump 7 seconds at a time even at the slightest movement.
I haven’t been as impressed with MyDVD as you seem to be since I’m spoiled by the ease of removing commercials with other programs such as VideoReDo and VirtualDub. I still use MyDVD to burn TivoToGo shows because it does automatic transcoding to fit more video on a single disc (with the Fit to DVD setting). Has anyone had any problems with “Fit to DVD” setting not actually fitting on a DVD-RW? I’ve tried to put three 42 minute episodes on a disc several times now and the last episode always gets cut off. When I select the options to save the dvd image to disc the ISO ends up being like 5+ GB…
To answer you question about speed, I have a Dual 2.8 Ghz Xeon box with 1GB of dual channel RAM and two 74GB Western Digital Raptors (the 10k RPM ones) in RAID 0. The encoding usually takes about 3 1/2 hours or so for the 3 episode discs I mention above.
Good post – did you encounter any problems with customizing the background? Reason I ask is I created a DVD and changed the background and during the process of burning the DVD i got some confusing error message about the background being sized incorrectly – the problem of course is that my PC went through the whole process of transcoding/etc and just when it got to burning it aborted
Otherwise my feedback of MyDVD is fairly good – it is easy and on my 3.4Ghz w/2GB RAM it takes about 1 hour to transcode/burn per 1 hour of high quality Tivo recordings. IMHO i wish the tivo desktop app was at least as reliable as myDVD
No, I did not run into any problems with applying the background. It worked the first time!
Review: Sonic MyDVD (TivoBlog.com)
TivoBlog.com has posted the second part of their Sonic MyDVD review. After a minor installation snafu, they were really pleased with the results….
MyDvd was easy to use. I put one 45 minute program on a
Memorex 16X Dvd, recording on High Quality. The resulting
Dvd, however, had annoying flutter in quick action scenes.
Maybe I’m expecting too much, but I thought the Dvd would
look as good as the original Tivo recording. I’m using a new
Memorex dual layer burner. Should I be getting flutter in
the Dvd’s that I burn?
My quality was excellent. I didn’t experience the fluttering that you are talking about. Anybody else experience this?
I have noticed this fluttering on a few of the shows I burned to disc using MyDVD. I usually saw them when there was a lot of panning motion across scenes with high color contrasts (such as pure white snow and deep blue sky). I never really isolated the cause but through some tinkering I noticed the MPEG stream was messed up in the .tivo source files in which I was seeing the problems. I suspect the issues in the source file were too great for the Sonic encoder to compensate for them and thus the transcoded file ended up all fluttery. I don’t know if it’s possible but somehow correcting these MPEG stream problems before importing the video into MyDVD would probably fix the fluttery video. I could be on the wrong track all together here…
Sonic MyDVD Review
TivoBlog has a two-part review up of Sonic’s MyDVD 6.0 with the Tivo plug-in.
After a shakey start, it all seemed to go well…
Other then the hiccups I had with my initial installation, I am extremely happy with MyDVD thus far. The burning/tra…
[...] ce how slow my computer was when I started to use MyDVD. In case you didn’t read my previous post, it took me nearly 6 hours to burn a DVD. Along with My [...]
i have exerpienced the flutter also. but here’s some more information … i burned the tivo recording to disk. when i played the DVD files from my hard disk, there is no flutter. however, when i record to DVD and play from that, there is flutter … both when i play the DVD on my computer and when i play it on my DVD player.
so, seems like there is something wrong in the burn process. i used nero to burn the DVD. i think the other person used sonic mydvd. so i don’t know where the problem is.
I bought this product largely because of TIVO, which my wife and I happen to thoroughly enjoy. I say that in response to a post that is cancelling TIVO because of Sonic software. OK, whatever.
When I bought my current Dell, with a DVD burner, I paid extra, I believe, for Sonic software for it. As I had to reformat the hard drive I had to reinstall all the additional software. Sonic DVD software repeatedly crashed during install.
Once TIVO started allowing transfer of shows from DVD to PC (watch a 120gig hard drive fill up virtually overnight) I decided to get a real version of Sonic as that was required to burn the shows to DVD. The store bought version did install. However after the install it required a reboot, which failed via BSOD. I haven’t seen a BSOD since NT4. By reverting to previous good image I did get the machine back. However after burning a dvd other programs stopped working. In fact SETI and Symantec both said their software was damaged and needed to be reinstalled. I did some research and discovered there was a firmware patch form my DVD burner from TEAC. I installed it as it upgraded the firmware shipped by Dell on it by several levels, C to N as I recall. After having done that I reinstalled the Sonic software. The machine will reboot now and I can still burn shows but other software starts to lock up shortly thereafter. My feeling is Sonic installed an XP service which is virtually the only reason you’d need to reboot afer installation and that service, which interacts with the device, is very buggy. So it is not clear whether this is truly a Sonic issue or TEAC issue as I doubt (hope) Sonic didn’t write (outsource) the service to burn to the DVD as opposed to simply having shipped it.
That said, their ability to edit sucks. The controls to locate and surgically remove commercials is very coarse grained; you, for all intents and purposes, can’t isolate commercials. The slider you are forced to use is small and the granularity of control is about 30 secs. There is a nudge control but it is locked at 1 sec granularity and requires about 1 sec to reenable itself after a nudge so to move forward or back 30 secs takes 30 seconds and requires 30 finger clicks (can you say hello carpal tunnel?).
If this were 1985, I’d say it was a decent piece of software, but being 2005 I say it sucks. TIVO needs to drop the reqiirement to need Sonic. In fact I will copy this review and send it to TIVO.
AUser,
It’s unfortunate that your experience with MyDVD hasn’t been as pleasant as mine. Like I said in my post, I had some problems early on however; I was able to over come them with a reinstall. In my opinion, TiVo is a great piece of software for some basic DVD editing. If you want to get into some advanced stuff then you may need to get another application. I know that several people on TiVoCommunity.com have complained about MyDVD. Hopefully TiVo and Sonic listen to their complaints.
Good luck,
Alex
My issue with mydvd is with saving files. They do not save correctly. 20 minut file might say it’s 5 seconds long. And it only plays in 5 seconds sections. The entire movie is still there and you can skip between teh parts but you can not paly the entire thing at once