I don't know about you, but I'm a serious media junkie. I mean, I've got a huge DVD and Blu-ray disc collection, more CDs than I can count, and a lifetime of family photos and videos stored on hard drives and thumb drives (as well as a bunch on my iPhone). When I'm not working, I'm usually watching a movie, surfing Facebook, or both.
So when I discovered CyberLink PowerDVD 11 Ultra, I was super jazzed. Let's take a quick look at what it can do.
PowerDVD is a universal media player. It lets you enjoy all your home entertainment activities in one place by accessing them from a single application. From within PowerDVD, you can play virtually any movie, music, or video file, and view photos online and stored on your PC and gadgets like an iPhone or iPad. PowerDVD even lets you enhance the quality of YouTube videos, clean up noisy soundtracks, and stabilize shaky videos. Think of it as a home entertainment hub that also fixes imperfections.
What’s one thing restaurants, Web sites, and DVD movies all have in common? Give up? Menus! Without menus, we wouldn’t be able to, well, get to all the good stuff! For the last couple of posts, I’ve been talking about how to create your very own movie DVD using Cyberlink PowerProducer. Today I’m going to walk you through creating a menu. You’ll need one so users can see what’s on your disc, jump to specific scenes in your video, and even watch bonus materials – just like a Hollywood DVD!
Putting your home videos on a DVD or Blu-ray disc is a great way to share them with people who haven’t jumped on the social networking bandwagon yet — people like my parents. My folks aren’t on Facebook and they don’t own a smartphone. However, they do have HDTVs and DVD players all over the house. To them, a DVD with photos and videos of their grandkids is heaven on a platter. So I decided to use CyberLink PowerProducer 5.5’s easy-to-use authoring tools to create a DVD of my eldest daughter’s wedding.
The centerpiece of my project was a professionally shot video stored on a DVD. My plan was to copy this video and combine it with a bunch of still photos from my hard drive.
Luckily for me, PowerProducer accepts a plethora of video formats, including VOB (Video OBject) files, the format used by DVDs. Using Windows Explorer, I simply located the file on the DVD, selected it, and imported it. As you can imagine, it was a big file, so even my superfast laptop took a couple minutes to copy it from the disc onto my hard drive.
Ever admired the look of a DVD and Blu-ray movie? I mean, those things are fancy! They open with music and background videos, have elaborate menus, and let you jump straight to specific scenes and bonus features.
Believe it or not, you, too, can make a movie disc that looks like it came straight out of Hollywood. You can burn your own videos, music, and still photos to a DVD or Blu-ray disc and add many of the same professional flourishes you see on commercial discs. Let's take a look at how to do it using PowerProducer 5.5, CyberLink's affordable and easy-to-use DVD and Blu-ray Disc authoring software.
To become a movie-disc-making mogul, you need a PC that can burn discs. (To create Blu-ray Discs, that PC will need a Blu-ray burner. For video CDs and DVDs, a standard DVD burner is fine.) If your PC is outfitted with a second-generation Intel Core i5 or i7 processor, that's even better. Both of processors include Intel Quick Sync Video (Intel QSV) and Hyper-Threading technologies to speed up PowerProducer's disc authoring process. PowerProducer 5.5 is optimized to take advantage of these technologies, saving hours of production time without sacrificing an iota of image quality.
If you take a picture of your dog smiling and you don’t post it on Facebook, does the picture really exist? Of course it does! But if you don’t share your photos, really, what’s the point in taking them? Which is why I’m glad Cyberlink PhotoDirector makes it so easy to export pictures to my favorite social media sites.
