Customer Reviews

Roxio Popcorn 3 [OLD VERSION]

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

If you are thinking of buying Popcorn to use the Tivo-toGo feature to encode Tivo files for your iPod or to burn onto DVD, do not spend your money before checking out Tivo and Roxio discussion forums to see if some well-documented problems have been fixed.

Popcorn worked well until the Tivo Fall '07 update was pushed out in October. Tivo files transferred since the update will usually play on your laptop or desktop, but there are serious problems with the export for iPod and DVD functions. At first, the export functions would not work at all in many cases. Roxio eventually got a fix out that allows it to work most of the time, but there is a continuing problem with audio synchronization. Audio is often out of sync with video by anywhere from a half second to three or four seconds.

The annoying thing is that it's completely unpredictable; some programs encode perfectly, some are all but unwatchable. There is no pattern except that 30-Minute programs seem to encode correctly more often than longer shows. My own experience is that you have about a 50/50 chance that it will work correctly.

There are alternatives out there; they may not be as fast or convenient as Popcorn, but they actually work every time. Toast 8, by the way, has the same set of problems.

Roxio continues to disappoint with this product. Video quality is mediocre at best. This product does a lot of strange things that are annoying, such as tagging all converted video as TV in itunes. The software will let you create a dvd with multiple video_ts folders (with menu), but it will not let you shrink to fit before burning, which is just plain stupid as it will shrink to fit almost every other option. I have encoded many dvds using popcorn and the free handbrake software produces much higher quality video files, there really is no reason to own popcorn.

DVD Burning: Popcorn 3 has done fine burning DVDs, and indeed the new version successfully burned a VIDEO_TS that the my Popcorn 2 failed to do.

TiVo: It only half works: it has a good viewer of your networked TiVo recordings, and can download them just fine .. although it pretty slow. But it simply cannot convert to a format without the audio getting out of sync.

So for Mac users, you can likely get along with tivodecode + Visual Hub for transforming from .tivo to .mpg + conversion to other formats.

This is, however, one more example where Roxio simply doesn't give a damn about Mac users. I try to avoid them and will do so much more in the future, unless they exhibit a considerable change of heart.

I was really nervous about buying this product based on the earlier reviews. And to my disappointment, out of the box it was completely unusable on Leopard. HOWEVER -- I found a update on the roxio website that fixed my issues.

I would say this product is best for the basic needs of a Mac Tivo user. All I want to do is to move Tivo recordings on to my MacBook so I can watch them on the plane. For that purpose, it works just fine -- plus the interface is MUCH better than the PC version. They seemed to fix the audio sync issue along with other tivo-related issues mentioned.

I am not a big Roxio fan, having had prior issues with other products of theirs...but this update seems to provide a workable Tivo interface for Mac without having to buy the more pricey Roxio Toast 8 Titanium (Mac)

Again - out of the box it wasn't usable for me - I had to get the update for it to work on my MacBook

Here is more info from the Roxio website under Software updates for Popcorn:

Popcorn v3.0.2:

* Popcorn 3 is now compatible with Mac OS X v10.5 (Leopard)
* Resolves issue where DVD chapters were not correctly preserved as bookmarks
* DTS audio is no longer incorrectly identified as MPEG-1
* Language of audio tracks is now correctly displayed to user
* Users can now properly switch between PAL and NTSC output settings for DVD-Video
* Should no longer receive error 1634955892 when using physical DVD source
* Exporting from DVD source should no longer cause error -43 or -206
* Resolves issue where exporting to 3G format would generate an error message
* Resolves synchronization issue experienced when using 24fps H.264 content
* Resolves issue where disabling Fit-To-DVD compression generated -50 error
* Resolves issue where Fit-to-DVD video compression calculation was incorrect
* Resolves issue with black frames appearing in video after conversion
* TiVo recordings created after TiVo's Fall 2007 DVR update will no longer cause the application to hang during encoding

Toast Video Player v1.0.2:

* TiVo HD recordings now play back at correct speed

I'm not really sure why this application even exists. Toast does everything this applications does and more. Popcorn won't make backup copies of your DVD movies, and the Tivo features barely work. My mistake was not looking deeper into the discussions about this application, before I purchased it.
Other apps. are better choices!

I have used this to burn DVDs of files obtained using a DRM-removal tool to make copies of the DVDs I own. It is fast, works well, user friendly, and well-priced compared to the competition.

Popcorn 3 (Mac) This Software has been a total wste of time and money. It quite frankly has totally failed to work onmy iMac G5 running OSx 10.4. I spent a week working with the Roxio trouble shooters trying to get even one successful DVD crunch and burn to no avail. Don't waste time or money on this software.

I would NOT recommend this product. After installing it on my Mac (Dual 2.5 GHz PowerPC G5 - 10.5.8) it would not launch. After digging into reviews on the Web it turns out that this is a HUGE problem that "maybe" fixed by another upgrade and some tweaks. Others that did the upgrade and tweaks were still having issues. I do not think vendors should be allowed to sell this product. I pulled it off my computer and went back to version 1.3. For me Popcorn 3 was a complete waste of money.

This version of Roxio Popcorn worked well with the older versions of Mac OSX, but is unusable with versions later than 10.5.8. You will have to buy a newer version or different software.

Frankly, there is nothing you can do with this proprietary software that you can't do with freeware if you are knowledgeable about searching for alternatives.

I purchased this software to download programs from my tivo to my computer. It worked great for a couple of months then inexplicably stopped working. After repeated attempts to contact roxio, I still am struggling with getting this to work. Judging from what I have now read online this is a fairly common occurrence. My only option is to call their support line which charges some outrageous amount to be able to speak to a human being. I would never buy anything from this company again.