Roxio Easy MediaCreator 7.5 Supersonic

DVD and VideoCD authoring is supplied by Roxio's DVD Builder. This has limited video-editing capabilities built-in as well. You can edit the video represented by each title icon on the menu, adding extra clips with transitions in between. There's an automatic chapter-detection function, although we found it was a little overzealous, finding chapter points for even fairly minor camera moves.

The menu design starts with the usual predefined themes for main and chapter menus, which can then be customised. You can also move buttons around the menu and resize them, and import your own photo or video backgrounds.

New to the DVD section is the DivX-to-DVD utility. This will convert your DivX files to DVD-compliant MPEG2 VOB files, and either burn them to DVD or leave them on your hard disk to burn manually. The potential copyright issues aside, it does its job well, converting DivX to MPEG2 at near real-time on a 3GHz system.

So, there's a huge amount packed in - we haven't even mentioned the capable Label Creator, the CinePlayer DVD playback software, the Media Manager, or the Image loader, which allows you to mount disc images stored on hard disk as virtual optical drives. Some of the individual apps, such as the video editor, aren't quite on a par with the standalone competition, and it would be easy to criticise Roxio for throwing far too much into one product - if it weren't for the price. Even at £60, just a few of the apps make the bundle good value, and the street price is likely to be less.

Author: James Morris