druidmeister
9th May 2003, 12:42
Hi ... beware of buying COPYDVDPRO .... I would suggest you look at DVDShrink as it is freeware and I have already done 14 DVDs with no issues at all.
Cudos … I have been using DVDShrink for the 14 DVDs and have had no problems with decrypting, encoding, and authoring and I have had absolutely no playability issues with the software using Nero to burn Verbatim and Fuji 2.4X DVD+Rs. This is a fun and fast and easy program to use and it blows the competition away. You are truly on the cutting edge with this software. I have never seen a program encode so fast (less than an hour) with such great results.
I had been using COPYDVDPRO which in my opinion I would never recommend again. I have had various problems with most of the DVDs I burned from copies made using their suggested software which they provide on their site or refer to other sites. In all fairness you can be the judge as here is a transcript of my last email to them and their last email to me. Perhaps I may be wrong but in my opinion I would not use them again. They have refused me further technical support saying that mine has run out. I have the email address out.
________________________________________________
“-----Original Message-----
...............................................
Sent: Thursday, May 08, 2003 7:16 AM
..........................
Subject: Re: Refund
Gregory:
Your advertisement states:
"Our guarantee is straight forward. We stand behind our packages because we know they work and we support you after the sale. In the rare case that your hardware configuration isn't supported, we'll promptly refund your purchase."
1. We had provided you with information that our discs would not burn and you stated that was a firmware issue with the Sony DRX500ULX. This was not true in our case and we resolved the issue outside of your technical support. In that case NERO did not burn the discs successfully ... Record DX did. You stated (RE: 4/8/2003 9:14:08 PM Eastern Daylight Time): "I know that if a customer can't burn a DVD with Nero, I really shouldn't feel too bad because Nero is the defacto burning tool and it's supposed to be compatible with everything, but I do feel like crap and I always refund the purchase.". Not clear why you are not refunding our money.
2. We provided Copy DVD Pro technical support with information that many of the DVDs we burned would not play in our standalone player. All you offered was that we visit your competitor's site to view their forums for support on our issues. Copy DVD Pro did not provide technical support.
3. We requested information on converting PAL to NTSC as none of these would play on our players after conversion. You stated (RE: 4/21/2003 9:32:51 PM Eastern Daylight Time): "We don't have any information in our tutorials to help you convert PAL to NTSC." At the time of the sale there was no disclaimer that Copy DVD Pro was NTSC specific.
4. None of the DVDs processed through your tutorial will play in our standalone player. Those processed through DVDShrink will play. Therefore our hardware configuration isn't supported by Copy DVD Pro.
Your software has been removed from our PC. We again request a refund. We have made an appointment with legal council.
Pete Maizitis “
_______________________________________________
“Subj: RE: Refund
Date: 5/8/2003 6:31:22 PM Eastern Daylight Time
..............
Pete,
I checked the 18 emails that I (Gregory) sent you, none of them contain the information you provided in your first point (1). You got a little creative with my words and added some of your own, my original words were:
"I've done some looking on the Sony website and a lot of other forums (not to mention all the customers of mine that own the DRU500) and there are some serious firmware issues with this drive. Many sites that sell DVDs also tell you that you'll need to update the firmware before their recordable DVD media will work with this drive. Nero is the defacto standard in DVD burning and you're telling me you have trouble with it, I'm not surprised.
I wish I have an answer for you other than make sure you've got the latest firmware in the writer. Also, I've read that you have to disable the DMA on the drive controller before you do the firmware upgrade, so be careful.
I will say that I've got several customers who've been successful making copies with this drive after getting the latest firmware, so I'm confident that it's possible to use this writer, but I'm not an expert on the drive myself."
From what I can see, there is a reference to Nero not being able to burn a DVD, however you are not required to use Nero and we recommend using DVD Decrypter together with ImgTools as the primary method of burning a DVD. If you had provided evidence of not being able to burn with DVD Decrypter to me, I would have refunded your purchase as I always do when there is a hardware compatibility issue that prevents a customer from using the software. Instead however you provided me the following:
"Actually the issue was not so much the firmware but the Hypermedia discs. It is just curious and Sony has no answer why only the 1st 6 could be burned. I did the firmware upgrade and it did not help. In one case I had success making a data disc with the included Veritas Record Now DX software (drop the whole video subdirectory into folders).I switched to Verbatim DVD+Rs 2.4X and they work great so far. I will also be trying the Fuji DVD+Rs 2.4X ."
This indicated to me that your problem was actually related to bad media. You can't expect me to be responsible for bad media.
2) Support comes in many forms, we don't claim to possess all the answers for software we didn't write. In this case however I did not send you to a competitors forum page looking for answers, I only mentioned that you are not the only one to have trouble copying a DVD, some DVDs are simply too difficult to copy no matter which tool you possess, including the competitions. I said you could confirm this if you looked on their forum pages. You have a knack for putting a spin on the original content of each email, which I preserve for cases such as this. We don't have all the answers, this is not the definition of support. Support is there to help you, we can't hold your hand through every step and make sure you do everything right.
3) You can copy a PAL DVD or an NTSC DVD, the tools we provide do both. Conversion between formats is not something we show you how to do, since none of the tools provide this capability. We don't make any claims that you can convert a DVD from one format to another.
4) DVD Shrink does not come with a burning tool, so if you can burn a "VIDEO_TS" folder with whatever tool you are using, you can do so with the "VIDEO_TS" folder produced by our tutorials. You said yourself that they played perfectly in WinDVD, which is all anyone can expect. After that, it's a question of media compatibility and quality and of course your standalone DVD player's ability to effectively player recordable media. Your "hardware configuration" doesn't include your television, your fridge and stove, nor your standalone DVD player, only your computer and the ability to use the software on it to copy a DVD. We don't guarantee you can play a DVD, only that you can copy one.
All of this comes as somewhat of a surprise given the fact that on 5/4/2003 you said the following:
"Hi Gregory:
Just wanted to say what a great tutorial ... I keep it open as I do my processing ... very informative for this complex process."
This came after all the problems you had and you only changed your tone once you found another shareware tool that it easier to use. If you buy a computer today, then in 3 weeks a better and cheaper model comes out, you can't expect the manufacturer to give you a refund. Since we don't have any control over the copying process once it's in your hands and since we can't guarantee that every tool will work flawlessly, we warn you of this in the disclaimer and you have to agree to it before you purchase the product, you did.
A refund will not be forthcoming, neither will any more correspondence from our company since you have obtained far more support than anyone I've ever dealt with, and I don't want the rest of my customers to have to wait unnecessarily for their answers. Free support is not for an indefinite time, yours has run out.
Gregory."”
__________________
Druidmeister
Cudos … I have been using DVDShrink for the 14 DVDs and have had no problems with decrypting, encoding, and authoring and I have had absolutely no playability issues with the software using Nero to burn Verbatim and Fuji 2.4X DVD+Rs. This is a fun and fast and easy program to use and it blows the competition away. You are truly on the cutting edge with this software. I have never seen a program encode so fast (less than an hour) with such great results.
I had been using COPYDVDPRO which in my opinion I would never recommend again. I have had various problems with most of the DVDs I burned from copies made using their suggested software which they provide on their site or refer to other sites. In all fairness you can be the judge as here is a transcript of my last email to them and their last email to me. Perhaps I may be wrong but in my opinion I would not use them again. They have refused me further technical support saying that mine has run out. I have the email address out.
________________________________________________
“-----Original Message-----
...............................................
Sent: Thursday, May 08, 2003 7:16 AM
..........................
Subject: Re: Refund
Gregory:
Your advertisement states:
"Our guarantee is straight forward. We stand behind our packages because we know they work and we support you after the sale. In the rare case that your hardware configuration isn't supported, we'll promptly refund your purchase."
1. We had provided you with information that our discs would not burn and you stated that was a firmware issue with the Sony DRX500ULX. This was not true in our case and we resolved the issue outside of your technical support. In that case NERO did not burn the discs successfully ... Record DX did. You stated (RE: 4/8/2003 9:14:08 PM Eastern Daylight Time): "I know that if a customer can't burn a DVD with Nero, I really shouldn't feel too bad because Nero is the defacto burning tool and it's supposed to be compatible with everything, but I do feel like crap and I always refund the purchase.". Not clear why you are not refunding our money.
2. We provided Copy DVD Pro technical support with information that many of the DVDs we burned would not play in our standalone player. All you offered was that we visit your competitor's site to view their forums for support on our issues. Copy DVD Pro did not provide technical support.
3. We requested information on converting PAL to NTSC as none of these would play on our players after conversion. You stated (RE: 4/21/2003 9:32:51 PM Eastern Daylight Time): "We don't have any information in our tutorials to help you convert PAL to NTSC." At the time of the sale there was no disclaimer that Copy DVD Pro was NTSC specific.
4. None of the DVDs processed through your tutorial will play in our standalone player. Those processed through DVDShrink will play. Therefore our hardware configuration isn't supported by Copy DVD Pro.
Your software has been removed from our PC. We again request a refund. We have made an appointment with legal council.
Pete Maizitis “
_______________________________________________
“Subj: RE: Refund
Date: 5/8/2003 6:31:22 PM Eastern Daylight Time
..............
Pete,
I checked the 18 emails that I (Gregory) sent you, none of them contain the information you provided in your first point (1). You got a little creative with my words and added some of your own, my original words were:
"I've done some looking on the Sony website and a lot of other forums (not to mention all the customers of mine that own the DRU500) and there are some serious firmware issues with this drive. Many sites that sell DVDs also tell you that you'll need to update the firmware before their recordable DVD media will work with this drive. Nero is the defacto standard in DVD burning and you're telling me you have trouble with it, I'm not surprised.
I wish I have an answer for you other than make sure you've got the latest firmware in the writer. Also, I've read that you have to disable the DMA on the drive controller before you do the firmware upgrade, so be careful.
I will say that I've got several customers who've been successful making copies with this drive after getting the latest firmware, so I'm confident that it's possible to use this writer, but I'm not an expert on the drive myself."
From what I can see, there is a reference to Nero not being able to burn a DVD, however you are not required to use Nero and we recommend using DVD Decrypter together with ImgTools as the primary method of burning a DVD. If you had provided evidence of not being able to burn with DVD Decrypter to me, I would have refunded your purchase as I always do when there is a hardware compatibility issue that prevents a customer from using the software. Instead however you provided me the following:
"Actually the issue was not so much the firmware but the Hypermedia discs. It is just curious and Sony has no answer why only the 1st 6 could be burned. I did the firmware upgrade and it did not help. In one case I had success making a data disc with the included Veritas Record Now DX software (drop the whole video subdirectory into folders).I switched to Verbatim DVD+Rs 2.4X and they work great so far. I will also be trying the Fuji DVD+Rs 2.4X ."
This indicated to me that your problem was actually related to bad media. You can't expect me to be responsible for bad media.
2) Support comes in many forms, we don't claim to possess all the answers for software we didn't write. In this case however I did not send you to a competitors forum page looking for answers, I only mentioned that you are not the only one to have trouble copying a DVD, some DVDs are simply too difficult to copy no matter which tool you possess, including the competitions. I said you could confirm this if you looked on their forum pages. You have a knack for putting a spin on the original content of each email, which I preserve for cases such as this. We don't have all the answers, this is not the definition of support. Support is there to help you, we can't hold your hand through every step and make sure you do everything right.
3) You can copy a PAL DVD or an NTSC DVD, the tools we provide do both. Conversion between formats is not something we show you how to do, since none of the tools provide this capability. We don't make any claims that you can convert a DVD from one format to another.
4) DVD Shrink does not come with a burning tool, so if you can burn a "VIDEO_TS" folder with whatever tool you are using, you can do so with the "VIDEO_TS" folder produced by our tutorials. You said yourself that they played perfectly in WinDVD, which is all anyone can expect. After that, it's a question of media compatibility and quality and of course your standalone DVD player's ability to effectively player recordable media. Your "hardware configuration" doesn't include your television, your fridge and stove, nor your standalone DVD player, only your computer and the ability to use the software on it to copy a DVD. We don't guarantee you can play a DVD, only that you can copy one.
All of this comes as somewhat of a surprise given the fact that on 5/4/2003 you said the following:
"Hi Gregory:
Just wanted to say what a great tutorial ... I keep it open as I do my processing ... very informative for this complex process."
This came after all the problems you had and you only changed your tone once you found another shareware tool that it easier to use. If you buy a computer today, then in 3 weeks a better and cheaper model comes out, you can't expect the manufacturer to give you a refund. Since we don't have any control over the copying process once it's in your hands and since we can't guarantee that every tool will work flawlessly, we warn you of this in the disclaimer and you have to agree to it before you purchase the product, you did.
A refund will not be forthcoming, neither will any more correspondence from our company since you have obtained far more support than anyone I've ever dealt with, and I don't want the rest of my customers to have to wait unnecessarily for their answers. Free support is not for an indefinite time, yours has run out.
Gregory."”
__________________
Druidmeister