Why I buy this one ?
- Easily produce professional-style DVDs
- Capture video directly from camcorder to DVD or CD
- Archive and share movies, photos, business presentations, and more
- Edit +RW and -RW DVDs again and again
- Create CD labels and case covers

sseal1 from FL, United States offers this stuff for:

Price : $27.50 Usually ships in 1-2 business days

What our customer's say!

"Stay Away", Take my word, stay away. This program has bugs.

"It can create VCD on a CD-R with a CD-R drive.", You don't need a DVD burner to create movies you can view on your DVD player; A VCD is burned on a CD, you can only burn about an hower of video but you don't need a DVD burner. If you burn several short videos it is easy to create a custom interactive menu. This program doesn't do anything but burn videos, it doesn't burn music CD, it doesn't burn a data CD, it does what it does well and I'm glad I have it.

"Nice, but could be Much Nicer", First of all, this program is worth its price. It's straightforward, stable, and creates very nice DVDs -- once you get used to it.

Major gripe: It cannot accurately calculate file sizes. It may show that a certain DVD program will fit on a DVD after file conversion when it actually won't: it ends up creating files which are too big, ultimately giving you a notice saying "will not fit onto disk" after hours of transcoding.

Minor gripe: It will not let you set the default font type, size, and color for project menus, meaning that if you have 6 clips (titles) with 6 chapters each, you have to manually set the font and its properties individually 36 times, not including the top menu.

Don't let Movie Factory do your video encoding. What I do, and recommend, is using another program to edit and prepare each clip, including the encoding to DVD-ready MPEG. (I use Ulead Video Studio 7, and it does a great job.) Then import the MPEG files into Movie Factory and have it make the DVD. That's what works great for me.

It's a combination that's inexpensive and gives impressive results.

"Don't waste your money", I wish there was an rating option of less than zero. After spending hours trying to make this piece of crap work and upgrading my DVD-RW to a SECOND ULEAD compatable device, I've given up trying to copy VHS tapes to DVD using this. If its not telling me my input device isn't compatable then its telling me it can't calculate the space. I went back to Sonic MYDVD and in about 30 seconds I'm copying VHS tapes. Its obvious the world of computer video software is in its infancy and there's bound to be problems but when you have vendors like ULEAD claiming that their products are all things simple, then the industry will have problems converting more people.

"Good author/burning, basic menu/editing, pitiful transcoding", Ulead's Moviefactory 2.0 (MF2) is among the cheapest DVD authoring tools available. The same price group also includes Cyperlink's PowerProducer and Sonic's MyDVD. But MF2 has the best features and is the most reliable among the three. I've been using it to record TV programs and burn them onto DVDs, and the results looked very close to the original broadcast with no audio sync problems. It has worked perfectly with my DVD rewritable drive (Sony DRU500AX) and has not created a single unreadable disc. I've used several brands of discs: Memorex +R 1x and 4x, -RW 1x, and +RW 2.4x, Verbatim -R 4x, Ritek -R 4x, and also generic brands like Meritline -R 2x, Princo -RW 1x, and Leda -R 4x, and they have all been burned successfully. The readability of the burned discs is also what I would expect. The more compatible -R discs were playable on all my DVD players and drives, while the +R, -RW, and +RW discs were playable on only some of them. (The compatibility of recordable DVDs is a known issue in the industry.)

To use MF2's built-in capture tool, you need a video capture card. (Mine is an ancient Pinnacle Studio PCTV tuner/capture card with BT878 chipset, with generic WDM drivers for Windows ME). MF2 is able to capture MPEG files with DVD-, VCD- or SVCD-compliance. For DVD-compliant MPEG capturing, you can only choose among the preset bitrates: CBR or VBR, 4000, 6000, or 8000 Mbps. You can choose between MPEG Layer II or LPCM audio, but you can't set the audio bitrate. You can choose between interlaced or non-interlaced capturing. Since most TV broadcasts are interlaced, capturing at interlaced mode is preferred; but be sure to choose the correct field order, or jerky motion will result. You cannot adjust advanced settings such as GOP count, number of I-Frames and P-frames, etc. to improve your capture. There is, however, a "quality" setting to improve picture quality. Set it as high as you can, but without burdening the CPU so much that it would cause dropped frames. On my Intel P4 2.4MHz, while capturing at VBR 8000 Mbps with MPEG Layer II audio 384 Kbs (my preferred settings for high-quality captures), I could set quality up to 12 (max is 15) without dropping frames, with CPU utilization at about 85% during capture. It is a good idea to monitor CPU utilization (with a tool such as CPUIdle) during capture. If it is near or at 100%, dropped frames would be very likely. Also, any activity that would increase CPU utilization, even as minor as moving your mouse, should be avoided in order to achieve no dropped frames. Video capturing is the first and most important step in DVD creation. Without a video source with good quality and DVD compliance, it would be necessary to re-encode, or transcode, the MPEG source, which is a laborious and time-consuming process.

MF2's own transcoding ability, however, is horrendous (and PowerProducer and MyDVD are even worse). Transcoding is done automatically whenever a non-compliant source is detected, or you can force MF2 to transcode. The resulted video is often filled with skipped frames and audio sync problems, indicating MF2's inability to alter video resolution and resample audio bitrate reliably. When I need to transcode, I use an external tool like TMPGEnc, and pass the resulted MPEG file back to MF2 before authoring the DVD. The best way is, of course, to avoid having to transcode altogether by obtaining a high-quality, compliant source material.

Thankfully, MF2 can author and burn DVDs reliably. You can author and burn to disc directly, or you can author to hard disk first and burn it to disc later. You can also create an ISO image of the authored files, and later burn the DVD from the image file. MF2 can also reliably detect the burning speed of a disc.

MF2 lets you add chapter stops and design menus for your DVD, but they are for the most basic purposes only. Menu design is template-based, and there is no "free-form" design. Chapter stops are added after video capture, either manually or automatically at an adjustable time interval (some software can create chapter stops during capture, but not MF2). You are only limited to adding a main menu and a chapter menu on your DVD. You cannot create additional screens for your own special purposes. You can, however, create "slide shows" -- a series of static images. There are a lot of menu templates to choose from, with a variety of background graphics and button placements. You can also import your own background graphics and add background music for your menu screen. You can also omit the menus altogether (which I often do, because the menus created with MF2 surely aren't going to impress anybody).

There are certain advanced functions that MF2 and other products in its price range cannot do, such as adding multiple audio tracks, subtitle tracks, multi-angles, 5.1 audio tracks, AC-3 audio processing, and more sophisticated menu designs. Software with these features usually cost hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars. Software with advanced video editing tools cost even more.

And MF2 is also very basic in video editing. It doesn't let you combine two video clips into one, insert transition effects, nor manipulate the audio. About the only useful thing it lets you do is extract portions of a clip.

A trial version of MF2 is available at Ulead's web site. It is fully functional for 30 days, with a limit of 20 pictures per slide show. The full version has no such limit.

Ulead also released a patch for MF2 on 8/22/03, notably adding PAL capture ability and fixing a few bugs.

Read this reviews before You buy...

"Best I have found for converting from VHS to DVD", DVD Movie Factory 2 is the BEST software the I have found to use with my USB Instant VideoCD VHS to Digital converter. I set up a DVD project, record the movie into the computer from the VHS Recorder and then burn a DVD and play it on my home or computer DVD player. I tried DVD Movie Factory 1 but found it was not as user friendly as DVD Movie Factory 2. If you have VHS tapes that your would like to convert to DVD and have a DVD writer - This is the product that I recommend.

"Slap a new face and a price tag on an update", Does many things that should have been included in original version, and if I still used that I would be upset about being charged for what should be a free product update. Still lacks behind competitors for menu design, titles, overlays, secondary audio. 2.0 seems to be designed towards splicing pre-existing or freshly captured video, making a basic, static (no moving backgrounds or video chapter previews) menu and having some music play in the background. Good enough for archiving old movies or your favorite tv shows, or for ripping dvds, which must be its other primary function if it can import from VOB files. Otherwise, creativity is stifled once again.

Summary: The people who burn dvds are rapidly increasing in number and in skill. Movie Factory (1.0 or 2.0) is too dumbed-down of a product to be of use.

"Not better than the Original Version", I ordered this item expecting it to further improve upon the original, which in itself was an outstanding product.

I was highly disappointed by this product.

A very big feature missing is the ability to convert video files to different formats, as well as the ability to combine different clips into one contiguous video file.

All this new software can do is create DVD disks. The original was much more robust as an all around video file editor, as well as create DVD disks.

Thanks, but I'll stick with the original.