Any recommendations for DVD burning software for use under Win XP?

[David Anderson]

Having now more or less completed reorganising about 5000 legacy images according to the principles laid out in The DAM Book, I now need to decide how to create DVD-R backups on my new Windows XP Pro workstation. Until recently, I was still using Windows 2000 but the Roxio Easy CD Creator 5 software I have is not compatible with XP.

Roxio now sells a wide range of DVD-related software (including Easy CD Creator 8 Suite), whose descriptions all emphasise clever things they do with MP3 music collections (irrelevant to a classical music lover who still buys ordinary CDs and hasn't joined the iPod generation!). I'd rather not pay for a bunch of features that clutter up the user interface and won't get used, though I'd live with that if I have to.

Any recommendations for a simple basic software package to burn DVDs? I'm wanting something solid, reliable and fast. Price is a secondary consideration.

David

[Mark Mendelsohn]

See what you think of nero.  They are at www.nero.com.

[johnbeardy]

Another recommendation for Nero.

[wombat2010]

At the risk of piling on . . . I use Nero, too, and have no complaints.  Although it does a lot of "fancy" things that are not relevant to backing up photos, it does the basics well and is pretty easy to use.

Stephen

[AndrewC]

Over the years I've paid a small fortune to Nero and Roxio to keep up to date with their software. And whenever I've had a problem I found out their tech support was useless, and I had to resort to user forums to get any help. So when the last round of expensive upgrades came around, I said "forget about it"! I found out that there are several excellent and FREE programs out there that work very well for backup purposes. My favorite is CDBurnerXP Pro:

http://www.cdburnerxp.se/

It has the basics for setting up a data CD/DVD and it does verification. That is all I need. There are more features in the pay version but I don't need them.

Andrew

[mwhals]

Another vote for Nero.

Mark H

[David Anderson]

Shortly after raising my original post, I checked out both the Nero and Roxio websites. I found the apparent coexistence of both Nero version 6 and 7 a little confusing, and silly titles like Nero 6 Reloaded a little irritating. Such trivial matters were enough, along with my previous familiarity with Roxio's interface, to make me go for Roxio Easy Media Creator 8. It was more of a toss of a coin than a scientific comparison.

Since then, I've noted the 100% vote here for Nero and wondered if I was not perhaps a bit hasty. So far, however, Roxio has done the job without any problem.

David