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Popcorn (3.0.2)
REVIEWED BY JEFFREY GAIER -- 05/2008
Popcorn is a video converting software. Say you want to take a convert a
DVD for use on your ipod. Or perhaps you have a video from your camcorder
that you want to convert to DVD. Popcorn will convert those items and more.
When I went to install version 3 everything loaded fine. When I went to start
the game It constantly crashed on start-up. I ended up going the the Roxio
forums and some other forums and I found that this seemed to happen to other
people as well. The fix was to download the update to 3.02 which I did.
Everything worked fine after that.
There are many features that this program has and while I would like to talk
about all of them, I will just touch on the features I could use.
If you are familiar with Roxio’s Toast then you should have no problem using
Popcorn. The interface in both programs is similar.
With video becoming more and more portable, this software is certainly helpful
to convert that media. I took one of my DVDs that had several episodes of a
show on it. I wanted to convert the episodes to video. Typically in some of
the other conversion programs I have used, I had to select individual episodes
to convert. This is not the case with Popcorn. I inserted my DVD into the drive,
selected Popcorn as the application choice, selected my DVD, told the program
I wanted it converted to AppleTV and pressed start. The program did the rest.
It found all the episodes on my disk, separated each episode and converted them
into separate files. Afterwords, Popcorn sent them to my Movie folder. I could
use Quicktime or even itunes to play the videos. I could also upload them to
my ipods.
The program also did a wonderful job of converting video to DVD. I had some home
movies that I took with my Sony camcorder. I selected the file and selected the
options to convert the file to DVD. The program gave me only three style of
options for menus. This seemed to me a little limiting as other video programs
have quite a few choices.
The conversion process works great and the videos are in good quality for playback
after conversion. Popcorn will remain on my computer as one of my favorite video
converters. Just keep in time that conversion times depend upon memory and processor
speed.
Pros
- Batch DVD-Video Compression - Compress videos from a 9 gb disk to a 4 gb disk.
Select multiple video files to compress in a batch.
- Pause and Resume - If you need your computer resources for another program,
you can pause your video compression to free up your resources.
- Broad Device Support - Converts videos for a wide range of video devices.
- Personalized Disc labels - Comes with Disc Label program to create your own
specialized disk labels.
- Copy Dvds - Make back-up copies of your DVDs or multiple copies.
- Television Made Portable - Has integrated EyeTV and TiVo support so you can
burn your video files from these programs directly to disk.
- Video Quality Preview - Not certain how your video will look, then use the
preview button to see if your qulity selection is where you want.
- Turbocharged H.264 Exports
Cons
- There are a few video formats that this program will not support
- Only three video menu options when burning to disk.
- Compressions vary with speed of computer, memory, format being converted too
and size of the file to convert.
System Requirements:
- Macintosh computer with PowerPC G4, G5, or Intel processor
- Mac OS X v10.4.10 or higher
- QuickTime 7.1.6 or later
- 300 MB of free disk space to install
- Up to 15 GB of temporary hard disk space may be need during usage
Optional:
- Up to 15 GB of temporary hard disk space may be needed during usage
- DVD burner and recordable media
- Apple TV™ Video iPod®, or iPhone™
- Blackberry® device with MPEG-4 video support
- Palm®, Treo™ 680, 700p, or 755p with MPEG-4 video support
- EyeTV video recorder or Turbo.264 video encoder hardware
- Xbox 360™ PlayStation® 3, or PSP™
- Other portable DivX, MPEG-4 or H.264 compliant video player
Supported Formats:
Input formats:
- DVD disc, disc image file, or VIDEO_TS folder
- All QuickTime video formats, and MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, AVI, DivX, VOB, EyeTV, and TiVo
Output formats:
- DVD disc or disc image file
- MPEG-4, H.264 or DivX files
Site: www.roxio.com
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