Comments on: MyDVD Review Part 2

By: Alex

Alex — Tue, 30 Aug 2005 10:16:03 +0000

Balazs,
Could you share how you got it to work incase other people are having the same problem?

By: Balazs

Balazs — Tue, 30 Aug 2005 02:53:37 +0000

It works! Pretty well hidden but found…
My overall experience with it that the program makes the best quality DVD so far including Apple’s own… Beautiful.
It takes a little while to figure it out but well worth it!

By: Balazs

Balazs — Mon, 29 Aug 2005 03:00:00 +0000

That would be the weirdest thing on earth being the most basic feature and having ordered the Deluxe version 6 costing $100+ but I had surprises before…

By: Alex

Alex — Sun, 28 Aug 2005 23:22:30 +0000

Balazs,
Is it possible that the version you have doesn’t allow you to access the features you are trying to access? What version of MyDVD are you using?

By: Balazs

Balazs — Sun, 28 Aug 2005 20:35:06 +0000

Thank you for the quick reaction. This is the most basic feature if you are to edit miniDV that is why I feel weird about asking such question but I just can’t seem to find it. I would seek outside help only I am in Kuwait and my options are extremely limited…

By: Alex

Alex — Sun, 28 Aug 2005 20:25:59 +0000

Balazs,
I wish I could help you with this however; I’ve never used this feature. Maybe somebody else can help?

Good luck,
Alex

By: Balazs

Balazs — Sun, 28 Aug 2005 18:18:31 +0000

Hi guys,
I am rather embarassed about this question but here it is. I just used MyDVD6 for the first time yesterday to burn my miniDV on disc. The quality is outstanding and I find the recording time much better than what I’ve experienced with iDVD on PowerBook G4, but – I cannot seem to find the most basic editing feature, edit movie, edit chapters seem to be inactive, another words I had to burn the whole tape on DVD without being able to remove/add chapters and do transitions. What am I doing wrong or rather what am I not doing right?
Thank you for your input,
Balazs

By: Kris

Kris — Sun, 21 Aug 2005 14:48:12 +0000

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

By: Alex

Alex — Sun, 19 Jun 2005 11:45:00 +0000

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

By: AUser

AUser — Sat, 18 Jun 2005 15:01:15 +0000

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.

By: Jeff

Jeff — Thu, 12 May 2005 02:28:21 +0000

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.

By: TiVoBlog.com » Blog Archive » I Finally Purchased A New Computer!

TiVoBlog.com » Blog Archive » I Finally Purchased A New Computer! — Sun, 08 May 2005 11:41:59 +0000

[...] 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 [...]

By: Mediacentric

Mediacentric — Sat, 07 May 2005 01:57:58 +0000

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…

By: BS

BS — Fri, 06 May 2005 20:27:32 +0000

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…

By: Alex

Alex — Fri, 06 May 2005 19:32:41 +0000

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?

By: David Inhoe

David Inhoe — Fri, 06 May 2005 15:10:40 +0000

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?

By: TVHarmony

TVHarmony — Tue, 03 May 2005 16:15:06 +0000

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….

By: Alex

Alex — Tue, 03 May 2005 15:32:31 +0000

Good post – did you encounter any problems with customizing the background?

No, I did not run into any problems with applying the background. It worked the first time!

By: TAH

TAH — Tue, 03 May 2005 15:14:19 +0000

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

By: BS

BS — Tue, 03 May 2005 14:25:07 +0000

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.

By: Brian

Brian — Tue, 03 May 2005 14:01:30 +0000

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.

By: Eric

Eric — Tue, 03 May 2005 13:53:37 +0000

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.