September 06, 2000 - According to their website, "DVDit is the easiest way to publish on DVD". Not having tried any other way, I am probably under-qualified to disagree with that statement, but I've got to hand it to them, I had few problems turning out a pretty nice looking disc.

DVDit is a PC product that makes a few interesting promises. One being that you can make DVDs very easily, with video, pretty menus, and music so simply that even your trailer-park uncle's dog could pull it off. If you have a DVD burner, you can burn them to a DVD that can be viewed in any DVD player. If you have a CD burner, you can burn it to a CD that can be read in any PC-based DVD player (not set top boxes). And if you have none of these, you can keep that bad boy sitting on your hard drive... I guess for exhibitions and the like.

I was, to say the least, interested. I have all kinds of stupid home videos that would be fun to stick onto disc and give out to my friends. I have a passable video capture card (ATI All-In-Wonder Pro AGP) an 8x CD burner (alas, no DVD Rom, but this product works exactly the same with a CD, just you don't have the size and can't play on set-tops), so onwards and upwards, I installed this bad boy.

It installed fine, recognized all my hardware, including my CD burner (which even Easy-CD has problems with), so I started it up and was presented with the minimalist menu.

Within about 10 minutes, I had made a pretty funky looking menu system, with screens connected by navigational arrows, each fairly graphical. It's really, REALLY easy to do this. The five icons on the bottom right are Background Art, Buttons, Text, Media and Play. By selecting one of these you get a list of choices above that can be dragged and dropped onto the screen.

Background Art - These hi-res photos are very funky looking. Just drag a thumbnail onto the menu, poof, new background.

Buttons - These come in all shapes and sizes. Making them work is so simple, you just drag a button onto the screen, and then drag a function onto that button. If you want the RIGHT ARROW to advance to the next screen, you drag a RIGHT ARROW, plop it down, and then drag the thumbnail of the next screen, and drop it onto that arrow. It's a snap.

Text - Hit the Icon, you get a the font list. Drag the appropriate font onto the page, where she stops, that's where you can type your word.

Media - Click on MEDIA and you get a list of all the items in your media folder. You have to manually add media in here, but it can be anything from AVI files, to WAV's, JPG's, BMP's or MPG's. Once you've filled your media folder (on the right), you just drag them and place them on the menu. This automatically creates a button linked to that media event. So, dragging a video clip onto the screen sets up a button with a picture of the clip's first frame on that button. Clicking the button shows you that AVI in full screen, and in stereo. If you want, you can place an audio item (.WAV) on top of a video item (AVI) and have the movie play with that audio instead. Home videos are better with music anyhow. Dragging music (WAV) onto the menu itself gives that screen a tune. Unfortunately, DVDit does not support MP3s, so I had to convert all music to WAV before I could use it.

Play - This gives you a remote control to view your creation so far as your audience would see it. Compile time is in milliseconds, so you can navigate the menus, try out the video, and see how it would look. The remote comes with DVD buttons like TITLE and MAIN MENU.

So no problem. I made a layout I was happy with, I was ready to commit it to disc. Clicking BUILD at the top of the screen brings up your burning options. Here you can play with the bit rate to fit more on the disc, and tweak your quality accordingly. (Blimey, so this is where the makers of The Highlander went wrong!)

Next you pick your burn settings. Note that you can leave that bad boy on the hard drive if you so choose. Clicking OK will check out your compatibility issues and burn the disc.

NOW THIS is where I ran into trouble. It turned out here that all my video was captured incorrectly. In fact, I found out a few things, one of which being that I need some new capture software! It blatantly turned it's nose up at the AVI's I had created, stating that MONO tracks were not allowed. OK, so I went back and recorded my AVI's into stereo. THEN it stated that all AVI's must have audio captured at a minimum of 48KHz. Back I went into my ATI Player to grab some AVI's that would be acceptable, but I found out that ATI Player seemed to only make AVI's at a maximum of 44KHz. Sheesh. When I tried running the disc in preview (PLAY) mode, none of these issues surfaced. I discovered after some trial and error that AVI's with no audio at all is in fact, acceptable. So I dropped some of these onto the disc, and dragged some WAV music onto it, and away it went.

What can I do with a CD burned like a DVD?
It burned my CD to look exactly like a DVD (their documentation refers to this as a cDVD), with the VIDEO_TS and AUDIO_TS directories and VOB files. The documentation assures you that this would play on any DVD software installed on a computer, which I have found so far to be the case (Tested on PowerDVD, ATI Player and Toshiba Laptop DVD Player). So even people who don't have DVD players or DVD-Roms can enjoy your creations, so long as they have a computer with a CD Rom (which is probably a much wider base). This made me wonder about whether or not this cDVD was just a fancy name for a Video Compact Disc (VCD) which most set-top DVD players (like the APEX) can play. So convinced I was that clever, I tossed it into my APEX, which just hummed at it disapprovingly. Scratch that theory, it isn't a VideoCD, just a data CD with DVD files put onto it, which most computers are tricked into thinking it's a real DVD in there...but a small one.

So then to sum up...

What I Liked:

• Simple, very, VERY easy to use.
• You can go from zero to a nice menu loaded video coded DVD in a very short space of time
• Intuitive interface, with nice features like drag & drop music dubbing
• The CD burning feature is very cool; it's nice to be able to give this to anyone with a PC.
• No compatibility or install issues

What You Might Also Want (But won't find here):

• A society in which all AVI's are deemed OK! Oh the snobbery of it all! If you use the budget stuff to make your AVI's like me, you might have some difficulty. (A magic quality transformer thingy would be nice!)
• MP3 support for audio
• The ability to make a video disc (VCD) simply
• Affordability. Price that starts at $499 and rides on up to $999 for the most deluxe edition

The next version is already on the way, it will be interesting to see if any of these issues get cleared up! We already know that version 2 supports features like 5.1 audio, so we'll keep you posted if we get any future incarnations of the product.

If you are looking for a way to stick attractive DVD's out there or even video content on a CD, and you have no problem creating higher quality AVI files, then I would recommend this product. The $499 starting price tag may put you off somewhat, but just think of all the money you'll make converting people's home videos onto DVD for them.

Kevin Archibald couldn't get his girlfriend to make the DVD he wanted to.

Check out the DVDit! website.

Media Types Supported by DVDit!

File Type	Extension(s)
Audio	720 x 480
Audio Visual Interleave (audio must be 48 kHz, 16-bit, stereo .wav format)	.avi
Audio for Windows (must be 48 kHz, 16-bit stereo)	.wav
MPEG-1 Layer II Audio (must be 48 kHz, 16-bit stereo)	.mpa .abs
Video	36 fields (18 frames) maximum
MPEG-2 elementary video streams (DVD compliant only)	.mpg .mpeg .m2v .mp2
MPEG-2 program streams (DVD compliant only)	.m2p .mpg .mpeg
Graphics	.bmp .rle
Bitmapped graphic	VBR maximum equal to or less than 9.80 Mbps
Macintosh PICT	.pct .pic .pict
Joint Photographic Expert Group	.jpg .jpeg
Portable Network Graphic	.png
Tagged Image File Format	.tif
Targa (must not be LZW compressed)	.tga .vda .icb .vst