WinX DVD Author: Feedback from winners

[jelson]

Really Late

I won a license for WinX DVD Author 5.5 back in July. Had it installed for awhile but haven't had occasion to use it till now.

Actually, for quite awhile now I haven't been able to use it or any WinX product: they would all hang at the splash screen during launch. Of course, I wondered why because I had used WinX Video Converter before. Finally, I figured out that the problem was Zemana Antilogger!!

Turns out that disabling protection & exiting Zemana is not enough, it has to be uninstalled.
Then all my WinX apps will launch. This is a problem!

Anyway, I did have occasion to give DVD Author a try. Just something simple: make a DVD of videos I've collected. The short answer is it works.

WinX DVD Author is a basic DVD creator app with nothing fancy. It'll get the job done.
If you'll looking for style or pizazz, look elsewhere.

One thing I found a bit annoying is each of the different tasks has it own screen:

1. Convert Video to VOB
2. VOB to DVD Compiler
3. Burn.

Of course, there is the Video DVD Author which combines all 3 steps into one. But in general, I don't like it when apps launch a fully focused screen for a component module. It's annoying ... and I sometimes forget where I am or want to go back and do something else with having to close the module I'm working in.

One thing I found missing was the option to create an ISO instead of burning directly to DVD. But of course, many users won't need that or even know what an ISO is. And this product is geared to the causal user.

Overall verdict: it works well, with decent results and it's very simple to use.

But I'm still wondering what WinX products are trying to at launch that the installation of Zemana stops.
Hmmmm... Interestingly, the installation as well as active protection of SpyShelter does not interfere with WinX apps. Perhaps, it's something about my XP Pro SP3 install. In near future, I'm going back to a system image of a year ago... before that troublesome install of Returnil. I can also see it I have the same problem on the as-shipped install of XP on my laptop.

P.S. I'm using the Combined Community Codec Pack (

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) which is often a better choice than the K-Lite codec packs for playback decoding (one

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among many.) Also, I have a number of codecs installed via Nero 8,

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(very nice) and

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. Of course, knowing which codecs to install, in what order, and configuration are something of an art form.