Allison Sheridan of the NosillaCast podcast here, hosted at podfeet.com.

Every once in a while I get a product to review that I really struggle with. It’s not that the product necessarily has anything wrong with it, but sometimes I just don’t see the point of all the things it can do. Maybe it’s that I don’t personally have a need for what it can do, or perhaps it really doesn’t have unique functionality - it’s hard to tell. This is one of those reviews.

The product that I’m giving such a difficult intro to is Popcorn from roxio.com. Now Roxio is a household name, well known for their quality products, like Toast for burning DVDs. Popcorn is a multi-faceted tool that has lots of distinctly different capabilities.

Popcorn can help you convert non-copy protected DVD movies to play on your iPhone, iPod, AppleTV, Playstation, Xbox, PSP, Blackberry, Palm, YouTube…the list goes on and on. So insert a DVD, it shows up in the main convert tab, and gives you some options on what you want to convert to. You can even schedule the conversion for a specific time, which is pretty cool. It’s going to take some time to get this done so you could set it to start after you left for work and when you got home it would be all done.

There have been various freeware programs to do this over the years, like the discontinued VisualHub and iSquint. Since those freeware programs have been around, I’m not sure this capability would merit the cost of Popcorn. One thing that might make it worth the price is that Roxio teamed up with Elgato so Popcorn will let you use Elgato’s Turbo.h264 to speed up your encoding. if you haven’t seen it, is an oversized thumb drive looking thing that actually is a hardware accelerator designed specifically to offload encoding from your computer’s cpu to this dedicated processor. I tried it out and it worked, at least I think it did - hard to tell unless you encode an entire DVD twice, once with and once without! It went pretty fast so I’m pretty confident it works as advertised.

The documentation for Popcorn said that you can also extract video clips from your non-copy protected DVDs. I was excited at the idea of extracting video clips from the home movie DVDs Steve so laboriously created for us and sending them up to Youtube. We have a hilarious clip of Lindsay when she was wee tiny dancing to my brother playing base, and I’ve wanted to pull that video out without having to work on the whole disk. I read the help file that came with Popcorn and while it does say you can extract video clips, it doesn’t tell you how. This is kind of a theme with Popcorn - the documentation that comes with it is great about telling you what you can do, but many things have no how.

I went online to the support section at roxio.com and I found the detailed instructions on how to do the extraction, but guess what? It won’t work on the DVDs Steve made using iMovie. His movies always have chapters and music and scene selections and all that, so I was really disappointed to find that Popcorn did not recognize the chapter markers, but instead saw the DVD as one giant file. Now they’re very clear throughout the documentation that they can only work on non-copy protected DVDs, and since this application was made for a Mac, it would make sense if it could recognize the chapters made by the Mac software iDVD. In a few other areas of the documentation they say they support iDVD but this is clearly not always the case.

Popcorn will create a disk image of your DVDs so you can do things like back them up to a hard drive, maybe hook it to a hacked AppleTV to play, that sort of thing. The functionality works exactly as advertised on Popcorn, but again this is something you don’t have to pay for - it’s built into the Apple Disk Utility. I argued this with research assistant Niraj and he brought up a good point - some people don’t want to go poking around in a bunch of different freeware programs, they want it all in one place and they want it to look pretty and be intuitive. That might be the real selling point for Popcorn because it does take some fiddling to figure out how to use the free tools. Popcorn has easy to follow menus that look very pretty and mac-like so it’s a more pleasant experience.

I’ve been experimenting recently with tools that will allow you to capture content from Tivo, bring it down to the Mac to play it, or convert it to use on a portable media player like an iPod, iPhone, or PSP. I tested out iTivo but it was far to flaky to recommend. Roxio’s press release said that Popcorn could transfer using TivoToGo to transfer from Tivo DVRs to watch on the computer, burn to a DVD, or convert for iPod or PSP, so this was worth a try.

Now this was considered an “Extra” feature but was actually the one that interested me most. It actually launches a separate program called TiVo Transfer, but it does it in a way that makes you feel like you’re still in one program. You have to find the IP address of your TiVo and the Media Access Key for the device and plug it into TiVo Transfer but they tell you how to find that before you get started. Next up TiVo Transfer shows you a list of your recorded shows. Select the ones you want to transfer, choose what format you want them in, and you’re off to the races.

Unfortunately some of my content was copy protected, which really irritated me, especially when I discovered that my CNET podcasts recorded via TiVo were copy protected! I wrote to Tom Merritt about this and he wrote back telling me that he and Molly Wood have complained like crazy about this to their bosses and haven’t been able to get it changed but he was going to forward my letter on to them to see if one more letter would break them. Seems so counterintuitive to have a freely available podcast in so many forms and then copy protect it when it gets to TiVo.

The help file in Popcorn also says you can transfer standard and HD video from your Mac to your TiVo but for the life of me I couldn’t find the menu choice that showed me how to do that. I found in a lot of cases the documentation told you what you could do, but now how to do it.

With Popcorn you can combine a set of movie files into one disk image that you can burn as a DVD or just play from your desktop. I took a bunch of little videos with my iPhone on Halloween of Steve and Ron carving their pumpkins but I made one big mistake - I took them all with the iPhone vertical instead of horizontal. Steve has been working on how to import them into iMovie HD and it’s been a bear of a problem to get the letterboxing right on them.

I used the Copy tab of Popcorn and clicked on DVD-Video and it allowed me to drag in my multiple video files, choose a menu style for each chapter and even mess with encoding if I wanted, which I most definitely did not want to do! You can lose days of your life if you start fiddling with encoding options and in my personal experience you end up back with the standard settings in the end game!


The interface is fantastic for this process - after you drag in your video clips and even photos for a little slideshow in the video, you can walk through each clip and name it as a separate chapter for the movie. They have a tab so you can do a quick review of the clip so you can remember why it was worthy of inclusion in your video before you name it. When you’re done setting things up, you can choose to burn it directly to a DVD, or make a disk image of it first. I recommend the disk image option because you can always burn from there using Popcorn or Disk Utility, but you don’t waste the time and materials making a physical DVD before you know if you’ve got everything just right!

I’m sad to report that after all my painstaking work to create each chapter for the DVD naming each clip, when Popcorn was done creating the DVD disk image, there were no chapters at all, not even an opening menu screen when I opened it using Apple’s DVD player. I tried opening it with the Toast DVD player that comes with Popcorn, and while it showed me the opening menu screen, I couldn’t select any of the items to play.

Remember at the beginning of this review I told you I wasn’t sure where it would go? I went back and forth throughout the review sometimes liking it, sometimes being aggravated, and in the end game I have to recommend a pass on Popcorn. Video clip extraction from videos created with iDVD failed, and creation of a chapter-filled DVD from video clips failed. Many of the features like creating a disk image of a DVD are already built into OSX. the only feature that worked well for me and wasn’t already freely available was the TiVo Transfer, but $50 for Popcorn is too much to pay for this features.

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