Burn Review: Easy DVD Burning On the Mac
Burn is open source software for the Mac OS X that can burn, according to its website “up to five kinds of disks.” So what? You may ask. My Mac already has a Super Drive, and it can burn all kinds of DVDs too. I know it can, but is it as simple to use as Burn? I think not.
Features (5 out of 5)
Burn is a freeware available from this website. No, this isn’t revolutionary software, but it will make burning DVDs just that much easier. I don’t know about you, but I don’t have the time to mess around with creating menus on iDVD. Also, iDVD only lets you have two hours of play time per-DVD. This can be really annoying. Burn doesn’t have menu options or anything fancy like that. It is a bare bones DVD burning software, but it works wonderfully.
Burn can burn five different mediums of media onto DVD. They include: MP3s and audio CDs, video in the following formats: VCD, SVCD, DVD and DivX. It can also burn pictures or copies of normal disk images, cue/bin images and toc images, and it can copy data disks, all according to its website.
If you have iTunes the audio CD thing isn’t that important, nor is the burning of images (which your Mac will handle simply as well). However, what Burn does best is burn video onto a DVD that you can play in a normal DVD player. It will only work on certain video formats: AVI and Quicktime being the most common. The process is simpler than that of iDVD. With Burn all you have to do is insert a DVD into your drive, and select which files you want it to convert into the format you wish to burn (convert AVI to DVD format, for example). Then you create a folder for the new files to be exported to, and when they are done being made you burn the disk. If you are doing multiple files each file will be its own chapter in the DVD. It is very easy, the only drawback is you need enough space on your hard drive to copy all of the files into the correct format.
Usefulness (5 out of 5)
I find Burn very useful for all my video burning needs. It is simple where iDVD is too complicated. You can fit more information on each DVD than you can with iDVD as well. Burn only takes into account how many GB are on the files and the DVD (usually around 4 GB). Also, if you are burning something with subtitles they will not be cut off by Burn, as they often are with iDVD. I use this software all the time to make back-ups of video I want to watch on a TV instead of the computer, and it works perfectly every time.
Overall (5 out of 5)
This is one of the best and most user friendly of all the disk burning software available for the Mac. It walks you through each step so even a novice can figure out what to do. If you have some AVI or Quicktime video files on your Mac that you wish you could watch on TV give it a try. You will not be disappointed!
