Get a FREE fully-working copy of Steganos Security Suite 7 (worth £49.99) when you sign up to the Practical PC Newsletter. Review: TransferMyVideo
Iain Laskey finds it's still important to read the small print
| Product | TransferMyVideo |
|---|---|
| Company | Avanquest |
| Web | www.avanquest.com |
| 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 | 4/10 |
| Requirements |
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. For good measure, it also works with Creative Zen, Archos, PSP, Nintendo DS and other formats.
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 as it only appears as a caption below a screen shot. For those who really like to flaunt the law there are other ways to get your favourite TV programs in a format that TransferMyVideo could work with but naturally we couldn't support or recommend such a course of action.
So given that TransferMyVideo 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. There are some options to either select automatic mode or manual tweaking but some of these just had a single option making them a Hobson's Choice. We thought it somewhat odd though that the opening screen which lets you select the output device type has a picture of a generic player for selecting the iPod. Couldn't they licence the image?
We tried it on a commercial DVD only to have it unceremoniously crash after telling us it wasn't going to copy it. For the purpose of experimentation we also tried it with some AVI files of movies that we'd created via other means. These seemed to convert OK but produced a file with no soundtrack. Not really very useful. Finally, we tried a file pulled from a DV camcorder and this did convert and copy over reasonably well and at a fair rate given the speed of our test PC.
The system requirements are a bit suspect - it needs Windows Media Player and an internet connection for getting CODECs - it would have been good if TransferMyVideo was a bit more self-contained. PDA and Smartphone output formats also need XviD - again, not included.
Conclusion
Once again, we have had the misfortune to review an iPod video converter that is clearly a dud. From the less than clear claims on the box to the flaky performance, TransferMyVideo is a failure. We suspect it's just a rehash of their earlier DVD2Pod product which was equally uninspiring. 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.
