Get a FREE fully-working copy of Steganos Security Suite 7 (worth £49.99) when you sign up to the Practical PC Newsletter. Review: DVD2Pod
Iain Laskey finds it's important to read the small print.
| Product | DVD2Pod |
|---|---|
| Company | BVRP |
| Web | www.avanquest.co.uk |
| Price | £19.99 |
| We like | Simple to use |
| We don't like | Doesn't copy anything you're likely to want to copy, buggy |
| Rating | 2/10 |
| Requirements | Sense of humour |
The Video iPod has proved very popular amongst those who want to watch movies or catch up with their favourite TV programs whilst on the move. The only problem is getting anything in the right format to begin with. DVD2Pod claims to convert any Movie, DVD or video file to an iPod friendly format.
That would be great except for one little wrinkle buried in the small print - it won't touch anything copy protected which pretty much covers every DVD you ever buy from a shop and are likely to want to transfer to your iPod. So in reality, it's only able to convert DVD's you've made yourself such as home videos from DV camcorder or those recorded using a DVD set top box. To be fair, this is more a limitation of UK law so it's unlikely any commercial program would offer this feature. The box should be much clearer than it is though. For those who really like to flaunt the law there are other ways to get your favourite TV programs in a format that DVD2Pod could work with but naturally we couldn't support or recommend such a course of action.
So given that DVD2Pod is rather limited in source material, how does it fare otherwise? It's simple to use, the entire process is automated and no technical knowledge is needed. Alas it's now another ugly problem rears its head. We found that the majority of the time the program failed midway through a conversion for no obvious reason. We tried a different PC in case it was a CODEC issue related to something left on the main test machine but found more of the same albeit with slightly less failures. We did manage to get 2 completed files after much experimentation. One played, one did not.
Conclusion
It's not very often a product comes along which is so clearly a dud. From the misleading claims on the box to the flaky performance, DVD2Pod is a failure. Given that there are freebie tools out there that do the same thing much more reliably although with a bit more effort, we can safely say ignore this product unless you're a rich masochist with too much time on your hands.
