15-Minute Reviews :: Wondershare Video to DVD Burner v2.0.17

Hello all and welcome to another 15-Minute Review! Today’s application is Wondershare Video to DVD Burner version 2.0.17 by Wondershare Software – An application to aid you in authoring DVDs by assembling different videos together.

Software Description

As Giveaway of the Day states:

“Wondershare Video to DVD Burner is a fast video-editing and DVD-authoring application. In just five steps, you can easily convert and burn all popular video files (AVI, MP4, MPG, MPEG, 3GP, WMV, ASF, RM, RMVB, DAT, MOV, FLV) to DVD for backup and enhancement.

With this powerful video to DVD burning software, you can combine your video files into video slideshows with beautiful transition effects and a customizable menu, and edit your video files by video cropping, video length trimming and setting different video effects.”

Quick Pros

• Interface easy to use
• A total of 60 transitions and 28 DVD menus (37 more DVD menus downloadable)
• Ability to organize into multiple ‘slideshows’ for navigation purposes handy
• Resulting DVD quality appears in good condition

Quick Cons

• Interface doesn’t look as polished as other Wondershare products
• Preview window does not appear to work (Tried a few different videos)
• Edit video and trim video seems bugged
• Conversion seems a little sluggish

Expansion

While I have done some video editing work in the past and know how painstaking it is to foray into some of the other packages available out there, this application looks like a good alternative for those wishing to make a DVD from their favorite videos.

While the interface is just as easy to use as other Wondershare products, somehow the title doesn’t quite feel as ‘polished’ as other Wondershare titles. It may be a combination of the flat-white look, the buttons looking strange along the top, or that some of the options are a tad obscured, such as the location where to alter your media type you are burning to.

True to typical Wondershare titles, there is a lot of transitions from video to video, as well as a lot of DVD menu presets as well. A total of 60 transitions are built-in, many of which are very advanced in motion, giving a professional look to your video transitions. There are 28 built-in DVD menu presets as well, with another 37 available through a download link at the bottom of the DVD menu window. That is 65 DVD menus altogether for you to use. The nice part of the DVD menu templates are not fixed and allow you to change the layout itself, a very handy function in itself. You can change the background images, the thumbnail images, add background music, and even add and change the text style and size.

While assembling my video (Which works very similarily to how you would arrange a video in Wondershare Photo Story), I found that you could create your own sections of the DVD (Which are called slideshows here) independently of one another; A handy feature indeed so that you can have your navigation menu point at different parts of your DVD. Now, there are other features in the main edit window; However, I had issues with them. The first issue was when I went to the ‘Edit selected video file…’. Upon my clicking of the button after choosing a video in my film strip, the application appears to have hung. Upon opening my Task Manager, I am greeted by about 85% CPU usage, the hard drive access is non-stop and memory quickly climbing. It climbed to about 440MB memory usage and floats around a bit at that point. After a few moments, the memory rapidly drops, CPU usage still running high. When the application reached around the 30MB again, the CPU and hard drive usage stops, and functionality never resumes in the application, requiring you to force-quit it. I tried this on a few different videos, to no avail; Always the same result. When I attempt to use the trim functionality, the exact same thing happens, but I am greeted by a half-drawn dialog box at the beginning as well. I’m not sure if this is an isolated incident, but I hope it is. Another note about the Edit window, as well as the Preview window; The application seems to be only able to preview its own content (The transitions and menus) but nothing else; The screen stays blank. I know I have working codecs for all the media I’m trying, and even the same result with FLV files (Which would likely be built-in decoding at some level) so I’m not sure where things went wrong here as well, and I do hope it is an is an isolated incident.

I tried my first conversion and all went pretty smoothly but it was a bit slow, even for video conversion, but it is not unbearable speeds either. I turned off the Show Preview function to see if I could squeeze a bit more speed out of the application, and seemed to help a little bit. One thing I did notice is that between my first and second slide, the preview began again, even though ‘Show Preview’ was unchecked; An odd bug.

The resulting DVD came out looking great and ran well. I did have one audio sync issue with one of the video clips, but this video has given me sync grief previously with a few other conversion applications as well so I don’t chalk this up to Wondershare causing it.

Final Verdict

I am hoping that my issues with the preview, trim and edit functions are isolated to myself and others don’t have the same issue. The application (For what I could use) seems very powerful, even though it doesn’t look as polished as other Wondershare titles. While free, if you ever want to assemble a collection of videos for DVD creation (Wedding/Anniversary/Reunions, collections of online videos or otherwise), this title may be one to check out to see if you have the same issues as I did – It does offer some powerful functionality and I would have likely used it to assemble my quick videos instead of spending hours with other tools (if this tool didn’t break). As for paying $39.95, I would seriously recommend trying the demo first before paying for this title; With the issues I had with this title, I would not purchase this title unless I was absolutely sure these issues were gone.

Posted by BladedThoth on Friday, September 14, 2007