Product Reviews

DivX Author 15 is a video-conversion utility that specialises in creating DivX files. It accepts a variety of input formats, including unencrypted DVD, and takes advantage of DivX 6's ability to incorporate DVD-style animated menus, chapters and slideshows into the DivX file.

The tabbed interface makes light work of importing, trimming and reordering videos, adding chapters and menus and exporting the results. Chapter points are defined

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manually or mapped across from the source DVD. It's also possible to preserve subtitles and even create your own from scratch. However, menus from the original DVD are lost, so you'll need to redesign them using the basic built-in templates. Advanced export quality settings are hidden in the Preferences dialog box.

The DivX format provides excellent video quality in small file sizes, but so too does WMV, H.264 and a variety of other formats. Each of these has limited support amongst mobile devices, but this is particularly true of DivX files with embedded menus, which will play only on devices that are DivX Ultra Certified. Rival software Roxio Copy & Convert (reviewed in What's New, Shopper 235) converts videos to DivX format without menus, but it also supports a wide range of other formats for playback on iPods, PSP, mobile phones and DVD players.

With its lower price, Roxio Copy & Convert has wider appeal. However, if you're confident that DivX is the only format you need, DivX Author 1.5 is hard to fault.