[XCSSA] Shareware vs Nero

[xcssa@xcssa.org]

My only machine that has a DVD burner is a Windows PC I bought last  
year to be the music server ("jukebox") for my whole house audio system.

I've always wanted to make DVD's from computer videos.  You would  
think it would be easy, but it quickly becomes very complicated.

I tried the "Windows Media Center" program burning DVD's.  It  puts  
all your videos into separate "titles" that do not play one after  
another, but have to be individually selected from a menu.  I find  
all these DVD menus very cumbersome.  If you have more than 4 items  
to select, you have to go through a tricky set of buttton pushes to  
get to the next menu page.  I think you should just be able to keep  
pressing "down" to go down through the entire list.

I tried 5 different Shareware programs for Windows that purport to be  
able to burn DVD's.  They all had serious bugs, limitations, and  
other issues.  I finally "bought" one for $35 that seemed to have  
fewer bugs than the rest, and I could actually make DVD's that played  
on 2 different DVD players.  But after a few days, I discovered it  
had some very serious problems.  In the process of converting my  
videos to DVD format, it often caused gross pixelization where the  
entire carpet would be pixel noise, or pixel noise could accumulate  
and peel or drip off of things!  (I had selected the highest quality  
mode, btw.)  I also discovered that the DVD's it produced wouldn't  
even play on two other of my DVD players, including an expensive and  
fairly new Denon 2910.  It also didn't provide any disk menu on the  
DVD at all.

Enough!  A program that bad could actually be some kind of trojan  
horse.  It seemed to be getting worse, too.  I deleted it from my  
drive and ran a full virus scan.

Even if the program had been OK, it still had no means to join  
seperate video clips into one big title.  You have to buy another  
share program, a "video joiner", to be able to do that.  For only  
$29...  Then you need the timeline editor, audio mixer, etc, etc.   
Only $29 each.

I had fallen into this shareware trap because google searches (such  
as "windows burn dvd") turned up hundreds of shareware programs, with  
not a single commercial site listed.  It almost appears the lack of a  
good DVD burner built-into Windows has created a giant bazaar of  
shareware venders feeding on people's ignorance.  They sell you one  
$19-$35 broken and crippled program, only to find that to accomplish  
real work you need to buy 2 more programs, so you might as well get  
the whole "video suite" for $99, or, today only, for $79.  Go for  
it!  It's recommended at all these shareware review sites, and the  
web now seems to be penetrated with shareware robots posting  
recommendations of the latest category entrants coming out weekly,  
whenever anyone mentions "burn DVD".   (These robots must not be very  
critical not to notice all the bugs.)  It all makes we wonder if this  
isn't some sort of conspiracy.  Maybe even a conspiracy by the major  
vendors to drive out the good shareware (if there is any) with a  
constant fresh stream of bad shareware.  Or just a racket.

I finally discovered there are two fairly cheap burning programs, one  
by Roxio and one by Nero.  Nero seems to have more fans, and is even  
lauded as a kind of "standard."

Once I finally got past all the new Nanny features of windows IE  
(which kept getting of the way of installing the program, I had to  
download it 3 times, made me wonder about another conspiracy;  
fortunately at 820kbytes/sec it only took 2 minues), the program  
installed fine, and I made my first one-title video (with menu for  
chapter selection, not title selection).  Video quality appears to be  
a perfect replica of the original video.

There's little point in buying buggy crippled useless shareware  
programs for $35 when  you can get the industry standard burning  
suite for only $79.  Nero also gives a free 15 day trial of the full  
uncrippled product.  That's a better trial than most shareware  
vendors offer.  And it's also available for linux.

I can see there might be a use for something on shareware for  
programs that the well known companies don't provide at all.  But  
otherwise, I'm not getting "shareware" to save money...and lose  
another week of my time in futile experimentation.

Most of the freeware I use, such as GNU Emacs and gcc, is exemplary.   
I think the con artists aren't attracted to freeware (except,  
perhaps, as a source of free code).  Unfortunately for windows users,  
the shareware market has squeezed out the freeware, and everybody  
doing anything for Windows wants to make a buck.

Charles