Menu Creation:  

With WinX you can create a chapter based menu with chapters. You can set the display with a standard 4:3 aspect ratio or 16:9 for wide screen. You can also choose to create a DVD without a menu.

The software includes about a half dozen templates. You can your own images as backgrounds to your menu and submenus. You can add chapters to your video clips, but only at timed intervals and once you add a chapter you can’t edit or recombine the cut, nor can you have less than two chapters for each inserted video.

Additionally you can’t add or modify navigation buttons. You can add text to your menus but you can’t add links to your text.

We noticed there was always a “back” button present even on the first title menu. We were unable to delete this button. We later found that your title menu isn’t the first screen that appears on your DVD. All DVDs include a static first page provided by WinX DVD with company branding.

Features:  

WinX DVD Author actually consists of three smaller applications working together, a converter, complier and burner.

WinX depends on you already having video files located on your hard drive. You cannot directly import your videos from your camcorder. We did find that WinX DVD Author is compatible with many different video files like AVI, DivX, WMV, MOV and more.

Although you can watch your video clips individually WinX does not include a built-in DVD player to check for menu functionality. One of WinX DVD Author’s user guides suggest you can save your finished project to a VCD or SVCD but we were unable to find that option anywhere in the output settings.

We found it strange that you can’t save a project you’ve been working on in WinX. You have to go all the way through the creation and burning process then export your finished project somewhere on your hard drive.

We also had to make sure our language was set to English. The software automatically defaults to Chinese.

Ease of Use:  

WinX DVD Author is very easy to use. They use the three step approach using arrows at the bottom of the application to indicate the next step. However, there is no tool bar and the simplicity does work against the software.

Quality of Copy:  

When we played our authored DVD we were surprised to find that WinX DVD decided to place its own brand menu as the first screen on our disc. The menus looked ok, there wasn’t any flicker on the screen. However, we were unable to go to the next clip or chapter on the DVD using the skip button. This is particularly annoying because the software insists all your imported video have at least two chapters, and you can’t decide exactly where those chapters go.

Ease of Installation/ Stability:  

WinX DVD Author installed without any problems. With regard to stability the software performed well. It didn’t soak up a lot of computer resources but it did shut down on us at least once.

Help/Support:  

WinX does not include a built-in user guide, but they do have one located online. However, the guide available online is not based on the newest version of the software.

You can contact Freetime Soft through email.

Although WinX DVD Author was able to create a menu based DVD, but the software is too simplistic, the quality of the DVD questionable and the inability to save your work is what put this product so far down our list.