Fifth Time is the Charm
No, I didn’t screw up the title of this post. It has taken me *5* attempts to finally get a DVD to burn correctly. Fortunately, a learning experience was embedded in there somewhere around try 3 or 4. The problem was being caused by a combination of Nero’s codecs and the fact that the file I was trying to transcode had a VBR audio track. At least, that’s the problem I’m pretty sure I had as a solution targeted for it solved my issue.
This also brings up an interesting thought on bug squashing. From the many forum threads I’ve read, Nero is definitely aware of this issue, but it’s a problem that has existed over two major versions of their full suite (6 and 7) along with three versions of the program that actually does the transcoding (2-4). Nero 8 is going to be released at the start of October, and it’ll be interesting to see whether this issue has been dealt with or not. On one hand, they made an assumption that I’d argue was a fair one to initially make: content that is going to be destined for a DVD is going to be in CBR form (since DVDs can’t handle VBR). On the other hand though, they’ve known about this problem for a long time, and it should be something that they could have patched in an update.
The Microsoft presentation that was at UTD tonight was definitely a good idea and IMO should be done again in the future, but the execution was way less than stellar. The people speaking were UTD alumni and didn’t seem to be all that prepared or have content that was really targeted at the audience (it was all important information, but almost everyone got bored really fast). Get an actual MS recruiter here with a presentation geared towards the right audience, and future events will be much, much better.