Video

I spent most of this afternoon (almost five hours, actually) trying to get 25mins of video footage from my Sony DCR-PC110 DV camera onto a DVD. What a palava. Nero is a sorry mess of an application – so bad you don’t even know what program to launch, let alone how to use what you think you need to use.

Do the manufacturers seriously expect me to understand their program menu items? Here’s what I’ve got:

Nero
    Nero OEM
       Nero Cover Designer
       Nero Express
    Nero Toolkit
       Nero CD-DVD Speed
       Nero DriveSpeed
       
    User's Guides
    Nero Smartstart
    Nero Digital

When I eventually got it on a DVD, I triumphantly went downstairs to play it on the TV, but the player said “Cannot read disk.” Bugger. Something in the back of my mind said something about “book type,” but by then I couldn’t be arsed. I can play it on my PC, but that’s not the point.

I suppose getting video to DVD just has to be incredibly complicated (after all, just burning CDs can be hard) but I can’t help feeling that having a supposedly mainstream piece of software that’s so obvioulsy created by geeks for geeks doesn’t help.

One good thing that did come out of this was that it was that it finally convinced me that my 5-year-old P600 really is too old now. The Dell website beckons…