Name: Mark Butler
Location: Antioch, Ca USA
Date: 2002-11-16
Customer Rating: -
Summary: Does pretty much what you need
Comment: I picked this up because I was looking for software to make slideshows on cd that I could play on my dvd player. I have Windows ME and relatively recent DVD players (2 in the house) and it has been working flawlessly. The software is easy-to-use, I literally installed it and made my first cd in 5 minutes by dragging a dir full of jpgs into it, selecting a mp3 for background music and telling it to "burn". It auto-timed the pictures to end when the song ended.
It uses the VCD style of disk format, where if you look at the disk contents you see a .exe file and a .dll file. So you must have a DVD player capable of reading that type of disk.
When actually playing the cd, it auto-sizes the pictures to full screen and allows the remote control to stop, pause and play. I wish it would have allowed a reverse and fastforward as well and took off one star because it doesn't.
It also doesn't seem to have any ability to group slides into different sets, have an opening menu and jump to a set - although its possible I haven't found that option yet.
All-in-all a pretty cheap and easy to use software that does the basics.
Name: A. Attanasio
Location: New Jersey, USA
Date: 2002-12-06
Customer Rating: -
Summary: OnDVD - if you can drag & drop you can make a DVD
Comment: If your looking for an EASY way to make a DVD picture show and a GREAT price, ONDVD is for you. You take your pictures, you import them into ONDVD (very easy to do either 1 picture at a time or the entire directory) and your all set! You can even import music (MP3 or Wav files) and insert them in your picture show. One important note - it's probably better to use a CD RW blank CD when burning your picture show. Most DVD's will accept a CD RW and not a regular CD R. You can't beat the LOW PRICE and EASE of use!
Name:
Location:
Date: 2004-06-17
Customer Rating: -
Summary: Patience, young Padawan...
Comment: I got this software free from purchasing a Dazzle 10 in 1 reader/writer.
I do agree with one of the reviewers about requiring patience in using this software. It does work once its quirks are discovered.
1. Slideshow does not advance - I had this issue and I think the cause of this is that the first frame gets inadvertently highlighted before burning the CD. In effect, this makes the frame/picture, the only one viewable. Now, I make it a point that no frame is highlighted before burning the VCD by clicking out of the timeline.
2. 200 picture file limit - When pictures are imported into the project, a physical copy of the picture file is brought over into the project directory. My workaround to ensure that 200 files were actually being used was to actually copy the files physically into the project directory.
3. Writing VCD - After a few coasters which seemed like finished products, I slowed down the write speed on my DVD writer from 16X (max speed of my writer) to 8X. This produced good VCDs that actually play to completion. The coasters do not play to completion and on my DVD player that plays most every format, it just does not play at all which was surprising to me. This hinted that something was amiss with how the VCD was burned.
The downsides of this software:
1. Pictures cannot be moved in blocks when in the timeline. Pictures have to be moved one by one.
2. Auto arrange cannot be applied to a certain block of pictures with respect to audio. It's all or nothing.
Name: Dan Noble
Location:
Date: 2002-10-03
Customer Rating: -
Summary: Fun program bad tech support.
Comment: I had read an article on DVD slide shows in Popular Photography and
thought it would be fun to try. I had picked OnDVD because of the price, if I didn't like it it wouldn't be a loss. The program was easy to use and fun, untill I tried to burn the cd.
I had problems burning it on a cd, I tried to call the tech support, which is not toll free and stayed on hold for 20 minutes then gave up. I faxed Dazzle and had no responce. They have a chat forum which others had the same problems I did. I will probably go with something like "DVD PICTURE SHOW" next time which seems to have a good reviews. I guess I got what I paid for.
Name:
Location:
Date: 2003-08-14
Customer Rating: -
Summary: Bare bones, patience needed
Comment: My wife got this for me last Christmas. I was expecting more and got less. I did get it to work and I did create a VCD format CDR but I would recommend a more powerful program. Some of the drawbacks I found
1) Music can only be MP3 (I had to find a program to convert my WMA's and other formats to MP3)
2) Limit of 200 pictures is actually 100 unless you do some crazy workaround, I don't remember how I FINALLY got it up to 200 (which isn't nearly enough for me to do a year's worth of picrues)
3) The preview mode is cheesy. In order to view the pictures and music together you have to play from the beginning every time, you can not preview from 1/2 way though the presentation.
4) No way to sort and store photos
5) Not everyone's DVD supports the VCD format that this program burns to.
My advice: Get a DVD burner and software to burn DVD format, don't mess with the VCD or SVCD.
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