MyDVD 9 Studio [OLD VERSION]

by Roxio

Product Features

• Sold Individually

Product Details

• Product Dimensions: 1.3 x 7.5 x 5.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4 ounces
• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S. and to APO/FPO addresses. For APO/FPO shipments, please check with the manufacturer regarding warranty and support issues.
• ASIN: B000LV9IT2
• Item model number: 231300
• Date first available at Amazon.com: November 21, 2006
• Average Customer Review: 1.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #13,288 in Software (See Top 100 in Software)
• Discontinued by manufacturer: Yes

Product Description

Your ultimate Video and DVD production solutionWhether you are working in Digital Video (DV) Standard Definition (SD) or High Definition (HD) MyDVD 9 Studio offers a hassle-free way to transfer and edit home recorded movies create compelling motion slideshows author standard and high definition DVDs and create video for portable devices all with superb production values. It is the ultimate video and DVD production suite.Broad native format supportIncredible real-time effects and transitionsComprehensive editing toolsOutput to DVD Blu-ray and potable device-compatible video formatsDisc Duplication and Compression capabilitiesSystem Requirements:Intel® Pentium® III1.6 GHz Pentium 4 or equivalent required for real-time MPEG-2 capture and burning Windows Vista Windows XP Professional Home or MCE Edition with Service Pack 2 or later Windows 2000 with Service Pack 4 or later 256MB RAM (512MB recommended) Microsoft Windows Media Player 10.0 or later DirectX 9.0c CD/DVD recordable drive Color video display adapter with at least 16MB VRAM (64MB recommended) 1024 x 768 16-bit color graphics card 16-bit Windows-compatible sound card 1GB of free hard disk space for typical installation of all components 1GB of free hard disk space for every 5 minutes of video (for video capture) QuickTime 6.5 software recommended Use Windows Update to ensure you have the latest Service Packs and fixes for your operating system and to get the latest versions of Media Player DirectX and Internet Explorer. Format: WIN 2000XPVISTA Genre: PRODUCTIVITY UPC: 815227007363 Manufacturer No: 231300

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

27 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars MyDVD was once great software, now it's the usual Roxio junk, December 29, 2006

By 

Lost My Mind (California, United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: MyDVD 9 Studio [OLD VERSION] (CD-ROM)

This product is among the worst products I have ever used. The software is buggy, extremely fussy, and produces incompatible DVD's. I've tried this on three different Windows XP Pro computers, ranging from my home PC to my work laptop. All had similar problems.

I purchased this product because of the extremely positive experiences I had with Sonic MyDVD 6; that product was the easiest to use and most feature rich product in its price class. I expected the same from this product.

Pros:
* 16:9 widescreen support
* Customizable menus
* Many tools can be accessed outside of MyDVD
* Cheap

Cons:
* Very buggy and crashes a lot
* DVD's are not compliant
* Poor compatibility with DVD writers
* Extremely slow at generating/encoding DVD's


I purchased Roxio MyDVD 9 to produce a three 40 photo slideshows and drop in 3 movie clips from my Canon camera. The main selling points of MyDVD 9 Premiere were wide-screen support, Pan & Zoom Effects for slideshows, and customizable menus.

I spent over 4 hours trying to setup a single 50 picture slideshow; it allows you to crop photos using its built-in wizard. Unfortunately, the software would freeze up after 10 crops and required me to force quit the software (losing my crops). The work around was to crop 7-9 photos, save the project, quit, and then start over. Each time I did this, I lost about 5 minutes waiting for MyDVD to load, and then the slideshow wizard to load.

The Pan Zoom Effects are mostly automated and cannot really be customized. Plus, when using PZE, it refused to put chapter marks to each photo. That means you have to fast-forward through the entire slideshow to get to a particular photo, or rewind to go back a photo. Very irritating.

Titles and text annotations on slideshows (i.e. a title screen) refused to save on 2 of my 3 computers. Project files would not safely copy from one computer to the next.

When it came time to add the movies, it added 1 of the movies just fine, adding the vertical letterbox to the 4:3 video for display on 16:9. The second movie it "stretched" to 16:9 even though the movie was 4:3. And the last movie it refused to add, claiming it was not a valid movie file. All three files were pulled from the camera unmodified and play just fine in WMP and Quicktime. I ended up using Quicktime to reconvert the movie to another format before MyDVD would accept them.

When it came time to burn the DVD, it gave me cryptic error messages. Their online help system did not have any info on the error messages and live customer support was closed around Christmas. I eventually found some forum recommendations that told me to apply a seemingly unrelated hotfix. That fixed the problems on one of my computers (other 2 kept getting the same errors).

I had to burn the DVD three times before I got a sort-of-working DVD. Each time I tried to burn the DVD, I had to wait for MyDVD to re-create my DVD (30 minutes). Unlike MyDVD 6, MyDVD 9 is unable to re-use the results from a previous burn. So that means you blow the full 30 minutes on every attempt.

The DVD-writer software in MyDVD always burns at 0.33x speed despite clicking the 2x so 5 minutes of DVD content took over 15 minutes to burn. other DVD software is able to burn at full speed.

The first attempt resulted in an empty DVD. Neither my PC nor DVD player could see any content on the DVD. Desperate and running out of time for Christmas dinner, I tried burning it again. I waiting another 45 minutes and ended up with a seemingly valid DVD; try to play it on my computer and DVD player--neither recognize it as a valid DVD (depsite having the Video_TS folder + VOB's).

I encoding again, this time to a "folder" instead of a DVD-R (another 30 minutes). I manually burned that folder to a DVD-R using Nero; Nero complained about the DVD-VIDEO folder being non-compliant, but I could not see anything wrong with it. Burned it anyway and ended up with a DVD that'll play on some Windows XP machines, but not on any Sony/Pioneer/Toshiba DVD players. It did play on my $25 Memorex blue-light special. All of these DVD's players have read DVD-R's produced by prior versions of MyDVD.

All subsequent attempts continue to produce non-compliant DVD-Videos that will only play on a few DVD players. Still haven't figured out what's not compliant about this DVD.

The icing on the cake was when I eventually got the DVD to play. The menu items were out of order. When I pressed "down" on my DVD remote to advance to the next menu item, it would jump around to random items. Even though the menu items visually showed it in order, the "down" buttom would jump from 1 to 6 to 3 to 2 to 5 to 4, etc.

Do not buy this software! My recommendation, find one that has a downloadable demo. My guess, Roxio discontinued Sonic MyDVD and rebranded some horrible Roxio product as MyDVD.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Terrible, August 4, 2007

By 

Brian (STATESVILLE, NC, United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: MyDVD 9 Studio [OLD VERSION] (CD-ROM)

This product took an hour to install on my fast gaming PC, and then I could not get it to work. I updated my DVD drive firmware, graphics card drivers, etc., as suggested by Roxio, no dice. What a terrible piece of non-working bloatware.

Then I tried Nero 7, which installed in about 10 minutes and worked perfectly out of the box.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars This program sucks!, June 11, 2007

By 

Robert R. "Robert R." (Pasadena, Ca.) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: MyDVD 9 Studio [OLD VERSION] (CD-ROM)

My computer met ALL requirements to run this program. This program made my computer crash causing me to lose some valuable information, which I was lucky to get from a few sources. When finally installed and working, it took almost 8 hours to burn a 2 hour DVD, and this was after the editing. And after the 8 hour burn, the DVD didn't work properly on my DVD player. I wasted good money on this product only to be disappointed. I don't think I am the only one.