johnmarsh, I agree with Miles. I tried all of those other programs. Maybe not all, but a lot of them. Nero had too many issues with the files, took too long to convert and burn without really telling you why. It just felt very unsatisfying.
I also tried Ashampoo's offerings...their regular burning software, and the shrink n burn one. I love Ashampoo's interface designs. but the program was buggy and crashed a lot. I can already see that most of the major companies have issues with a lot of the video file formats that we currently run into. Dealing with video files, DVD stuff, codecs, etc. is a very complicated thing in the internet world. The formats are really governed by what goes on in the pirating world. So, whether companies like it or not, the right way to approach designing this kind of software, if you want it to work, is to be familiar with how the pirates are using it. Hey, it's true. By the way, this is EXACTLY why most dvd players today still do not support all of the different file types, or have very klunky support for them. The industry does not want to make it easy to just stick in a data DVD with a bunch of avi files and play it easily. By making it hard with all these conversion issues and complications, it makes it harder to quickly download a movie and play it on your tv. Just FYI.
That's also probably why most of the good tools are all of these little command prompt stuff hidden away in forums. Pirates are the ones using this stuff mostly. But their little solutions are really effective and great. I once tried to look into how the famous AXXO makes his videos, only to find out it's deliberatly shrouded in a mystery. I wanted to convert my dvd's like he does because he gets really great quality with relatively small file sizes. When i tried to convert my dvd's using default program options, my quality was horrible at similar file sizes, and I had to go to enormous file sizes to have the same quality as axxo. So I never figured that out. now I just copy my dvd's using makemkv, but they are uncompressed, which means I will soon need many more hard drives.
What else did I try? Dvdlab...very nice program, but not a one-click solution. I am keeping in mind for when I want to make some more customized dvd's. But usually, I just want to grab some files and make a dvd quickly. And it doesn't convert any videos, you ahve to do that before using it.
What else...TMPG stuff. Very highly regarded for it's quality, but the program itself is pretty klunky. Errors, bugs occur frequently. To me, it was more of a pain than a convenience.
Anyway, I've tried dozens of programs related to all of this. I have to say, video stuff is one of the most complicated things I've had to deal with as far as software.
