Product Reviews

DVD Solution 3 Platinum is a suite of 10 applications loosely based around CD and DVD burning in a similar vein to Roxio Creator 7, Ahead Nero 6 and Sonic MyDVD Studio Deluxe 6. These suites are a great idea, as they fill in the gaps left by Windows XP and arm your PC for a wide range of multimedia tasks. However, no other package covers as wide a range of tasks as this one. While Creator, Nero and MyDVD Studio each offer certain features that distinguish them from each other - Creator includes photo editing, Nero offers incremental backups and MyDVD includes DVD playback software - Cyberlink trumps the lot by including all these features. The only thing missing is label design software - not something we miss.

Cyberlink is best known for its PowerDVD playback software, so it's no surprise that this is one of the highlights of the suite. Version 5 is included, which isn't the latest and doesn't support certain advanced features such as DTS audio, but does support Dolby Digital surround-sound playback.

PowerDirector Express 3 is a basic but friendly video-editing application. There are barely any effects

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and limited audio control, but it has some impressive 3D transitions and text animations to add some sparkle to your home movies. PhotoNow! is similar; there's not much to it, but if you just want to colour-correct, crop, rotate and resize photos you'll appreciate its simplicity.

The DVD authoring program is a little more involved. It can create DVD-Videos, Video CDs, SVCDs and DivX CDs, and also supports the DVD+VR format, which allows you to keep discs open for further editing. It can also burn discs directly from a DV camera. This worked well in tests - we used the DVD+VR format to add chapter points and customise the menu after the disc was created. The software's menu design features are basic, but explanations help new users.

As usual, the DVD copying program doesn't copy CSS-encrypted discs, but it does copy disc images you've decrypted by other means and saved to a hard disk. While this may be a little fiddly to use, it allows you to deselect extras one-by-one to keep the quality of the main film up, or to burn to dual-layer media.

The slideshow creation program is fiddly but includes a great range of output options including streaming video and HTML. The backup tool is much better, with useful options for disc spanning and full, incremental and differential backups, with explanations of the pros and cons. The data and audio disc burning application can rip CDs to MP3, but sadly doesn't support dual-layer DVD media.

This suite doesn't feel quite as polished as Nero and Creator, and many of the applications are a little sluggish, but the breadth of features may make up for this. It's a good-value package for those who will find a use for everything on offer.