DVD Burner Software review

[BDUAres]

My old and tired DVD burners in my laptops were in dire need of replacing, with burning failures rampant and discs not being read correctly, etc. No real surprise as they were several years old and had been purchased on Ebay to begin with. So I ordered myself a few new DVD burners on Ebay from various sellers and so far of the three drives I ordered two have arrived and been installed in two of my laptops.

While doing this I decided to try something different and look at some DVD burning software I had either not used before or had used a little ages ago. Normally I use Nero (from versions 5 through 9) for DVD burning, but the newer versions of Nero had seemed to be hugely bloated and contained tons of crap that I never used and did not need, and the speed and quality of the burning was not that great, which forced me to use it in 2X ( or 4X max) most of the time. So I downloaded 3 new version programs, Cheetah DVD Burner, CDBurnerXP Pro, and ImgBurn. Of these Cheetah is a commercial program and the other 2 are freeware.

Testing Cheetah I encountered an old problem of resources being hogged and the system being unusable while a DVD was burning. This was odd as the last time I had ever had to deal with this problem was over 10 years ago, and burning software and computer hardware has advanced to the point where you can multitask while burning, so this was a very poor showing on Cheetah's part. I also had verify errors galore. Now some people get the resource hogging and some don't, according to the info I have seen on various forums online. It's a bit of a hit and miss problem that has so many variables that It isn't worth the risk to spend money on it. I also did not trust the program once the verify errors showed themselves and didn't want to waste more than a half dozen DVD's on a test. 6 of 6 DVD's had verify errors, even at 2x. So Cheetah turned out to be no better, and possibly much worse than Nero.

CDBurnerXP Pro hogged less resources than Cheetah, but it also had some verify errors and while less hogging is better it is not great. The program seemed to be more stable, but there is tons of room for improvement and in the end I was looking for a program that was simple, straightforward and burned discs without errors as fast as possible. Out of a half dozen test DVD's only one came out with no verify error, even at 2x.

This brings me to ImgBurn 2.5.0.0, available in both installable and portable USB drive versions. This program is not only small at 2 megs, it comes with SPTI as an optional installable feature you can use in place of the ASPI layer. I installed this and used it. The program is very simple to use and extremely comprehensive as far as features are concerned. Actually a bit too comprehensive as I learned I had to go in a tick boxes to allow long filenames so it would not shorten them automatically. The interface resembles the old DVD Decrypter program and it can use a simple drag and drop to burn files/folders and images. On 2 different machines, with 2 different brands of DVD burner and 4 different brands of DVD media, both DVD-R and DVD+R, I have yet to have a single verify error and have made zero coasters out of more than 25 test burns! Even better, I set the program to burn at "MAX" speed (remember laptop DVD drives are maxed out at 8x burning speed) and I got results with average speeds of 4.3X-6X and max speeds of 8.2x regularly without a single error! The program has loads of features normally found only in commercial software, and it burns Blu-Ray and dual layer DVD's as well.

So for the ultimate bang for your buck in DVD burning software, which is not only free but gave me better results at faster speeds than the best of the commercial software out there, I give ImgBurn two enthusiastic thumbs up and I have happily replaced my Nero without any reservations or regrets. I am not alone in this as several of the DVD movie copying programs out there now use ImgBurn as their default burning software as well.

For a decent list of freeware DVD burning alternatives to Nero take a look at the reviews of 7 different programs here:

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/the-bes...-cddvd-burner/

The reviewer also provides screen shots of the software and links to download. This is where I first heard of ImgBurn.

[Feret]

I've only recently got a DVD burner, had a CD burner for a while and used Roxio, and since getting a new DVD burner and nero I've been impressed at how quickly I can back things up compared to the older version of Roxio, not just in burning, but in setting it up to start too.

[barak1001]

I've been using ImgBurn for maybe a year or less? I use it to quickly burn files to a dvd rather than having to go through the annoyance of loading Nero. I use alcohol120% for 1:1 copies (though I haven't burned anything with it in quite some time, apparently my tendency to pirate software has gotten less and less the older I get). I normally use WinAvi converter to convert AVI files to dvd, which has built in burner software. This seems to work really well for making a dvd, though I've yet to get it to make a DVD that my 360 can read.

[Weatherlight]

Well sir, I would happen to have a video solution to your problem. Although I'm vaguely surprised that youtube didn't spot this particular video and allow Microsoft to shove its megacorporation cock in this poor idiot's ass.

[Mhaddy]

Nice write-up - thorough review, well-written. I've dabbled with ImgBurn in the past on my Windows boxes and it was fairly robust - tend to agree with most of your points above.