Digital Home Thoughts: Roxio's MyDVD 9: Feature-Rich but Problematic

Unreliable Final Output
When my project was finished, and I had previewed all the elements, I was ready for the final step: burning it to DVD. Prior to burning, there’s a product validation step; it warned me about a few of my buttons overlapping on the menu. I clicked “Go To Error” to try and figure out what the problem was, but it simply took me to the editing screen and didn’t show me the problem. None of the errors were serious enough to stop the burn, so I clicked “Burn Anyway” and it proceeded to the Burn Project step. There are three choices for burning, and you can pick any two: burning it to a disc, creating an image (ISO) file, or creating a folder set (the DVD folder structure on the disk). It’s great that Roxio allows for this type of output flexibility – generating an ISO file makes it easy to archive the file and burn another copy of the DVD at a later date.

The first time through, I opted to burn the disc and also create an image file. The transcoding engine Roxio is using is quite fast: I timed the encoding of a 3 minute 17 second DV-AVI file and it was transcoded to MPEG2 in 52 seconds on my Intel Core 2 Duo Extreme X6800 running at 2.93 Ghz. I tested the resulting DVD in my Toshiba DVD player, and the first video file had a strange glitch – I had created the wedding ceremony video with five seconds or so of a title screen, with some background music, and had confirmed the source video file (a DV-AVI file output from Premiere Elements 4.0) was correct prior to burning. On the DVD, however, the title screen flashed up for perhaps one second, then went away – and the background music then started playing over the video itself. Why would the DVD be anything other than exactly like the source video? Only the programmers who coded MyDVD 9 can answer that question.

Frustrated, I returned to my computer and checked the video source file again – and it was fine. I tried burning the DVD again, this time creating an ISO file only, then I burned that ISO file to DVD using Nero 8 with data verification turned on. I noticed that all of the videos had to be re-rendered from scratch, which is a waste – why weren’t the previously encoded files simply re-used if I hadn’t changed anything? The resulting DVD passed the data verification test, so I was surprised when I put it in my PC and there was nothing but a blank screen – I couldn’t get anything to come up. I verified that the DVD was in fact burned to – you can see how much of any DVD is used up by the burn pattern. It turned out that Slysoft’s AnyDVD [Affiliate] was interfering with the playback of the DVD – once I exited AnyDVD playback of the DVD was fine…except that it still had the same glitch with the wedding ceremony video having the same truncated intro.

At this point I was very nearly ready to give up, but I thought I’d give it one last try: I removed and re-added the problematic wedding ceremony video (thinking maybe somehow that part of the project was corrupt), and opted to do a direct DVD burn. After waiting for all the video files to be transcoded from DV-AVI to MPEG2 for the third time, I eagerly tested the resulting DVD – and it had exactly the same problem as before with a one-second title and out of sync music. So what did I end up using to complete my wedding project DVD? Windows DVD Maker, the included tool that comes with Windows Vista. It took me all of ten minutes to add my videos, select the menu, customize it a bit, and start the encoding process. The final DVD played back perfectly, without any glitches, and looked superb. The free software that I usually overlook saved the day. Windows DVD Maker might not have much in the way of features, but it did the job properly – which I can't say for MyDVD 9.

Sonic Picked The Wrong Product to Survive
Prior to Sonic buying Roxio, they had a product that was called MyDVD but was entirely a Sonic product from top to bottom. It looks, and functioned, very differently than the Roxio product that bears the name MyDVD today. It was impressively fast, stable, and had great still-image and video quality. The consumer-level Sonic products were replaced by the Roxio products, and as you can see by the results I’ve gotten with MyDVD 9, that was a mistake. Sonic’s $299 DVDit Pro 6 seems to be the least expensive way to get the Sonic DVD-making technology, which is a shame. Roxio might have had the better-known brand name in the consumer software space, but they definitely did not have the superior software. For all the reasons mentioned in this article, I can't recommend Roxio's MyDVD 9 to anyone – there are better products out there.

Jason Dunn owns and operates Thoughts Media Inc., a company dedicated to creating the best in online communities. He enjoys mobile devices, digital media content creation/editing, and pretty much all technology. He lives in Calgary, Alberta, Canada with his lovely wife, and his sometimes obedient dog. He's still searching for the ultimate DVD burning software package.