Popcorn 3 Mac

Popcorn 3 is equipped with a variety of innovative features designed to simplify and accelerate the otherwise time consuming and CPU intensive video conversion process, including Automatic TiVoToGo Conversion that starts encoding as soon as the TV show is transferred to the Mac, Batch DVD-Video Conversion that enables consumers to queue up multiple DVDs for use with Roxio's Fit-to-DVD technology, and Pause and Resume buttons that enable users to suspend a disc copy or video conversion project, work on a different task, then resume when convenient. To reduce time spent on multiple conversions and to ensure end-results meet expectations, Popcorn 3 comes with Video Quality Preview that enables consumers to review a snippet of converted video to check video quality prior to initiating the full encoding process. Popcorn 3 also supports Elgato's Turbo.264 for faster video encoding. Popcorn 3 users can now create DVD's up to four hours long, resulting in fewer discs and decreasing the amount of time required for video-project transfer. The application also includes a rich disc labeling application that enables users to create personalized disc labels or print directly onto discs using LightScribe enabled burners and media. Built on the award-winning Toast burning technology, Popcorn 3 continues to provide consumers with a quick and easy way to copy and enjoy their movies on a disc or on-the-go. Preview movies and extras before copying Fit-to-DVD compression technology fits an entire 9 GB DVD video onto a standard 4.7 GB disc Maximize video quality and disc space usage by selecting just the main movie and audio Create your own Director's Cut custom compilation?choose the individual DVD movies, audio and languages you want Award-winning Toast burning technology supports all commercial DVD formats and ensures high quality copies

User Ratings and Reviews

2 Stars TiVo, bad; DVD burn OK
DVD Burning: Popcorn 3 has done fine burning DVDs, and indeed the new version successfully burned a VIDEO_TS that the my Popcorn 2 failed to do.

TiVo: It only half works: it has a good viewer of your networked TiVo recordings, and can download them just fine .. although it pretty slow. But it simply cannot convert to a format without the audio getting out of sync.

So for Mac users, you can likely get along with tivodecode + Visual Hub for transforming from .tivo to .mpg + conversion to other formats.

This is, however, one more example where Roxio simply doesn't give a damn about Mac users. I try to avoid them and will do so much more in the future, unless they exhibit a considerable change of heart.

1 Star Don't buy for Tivo-to-Go
If you are thinking of buying Popcorn to use the Tivo-toGo feature to encode Tivo files for your iPod or to burn onto DVD, do not spend your money before checking out Tivo and Roxio discussion forums to see if some well-documented problems have been fixed.

Popcorn worked well until the Tivo Fall '07 update was pushed out in October. Tivo files transferred since the update will usually play on your laptop or desktop, but there are serious problems with the export for iPod and DVD functions. At first, the export functions would not work at all in many cases. Roxio eventually got a fix out that allows it to work most of the time, but there is a continuing problem with audio synchronization. Audio is often out of sync with video by anywhere from a half second to three or four seconds.

The annoying thing is that it's completely unpredictable; some programs encode perfectly, some are all but unwatchable. There is no pattern except that 30-Minute programs seem to encode correctly more often than longer shows. My own experience is that you have about a 50/50 chance that it will work correctly.

There are alternatives out there; they may not be as fast or convenient as Popcorn, but they actually work every time. Toast 8, by the way, has the same set of problems.

1 Star Flat out terrible
Roxio continues to disappoint with this product. Video quality is mediocre at best. This product does a lot of strange things that are annoying, such as tagging all converted video as TV in itunes. The software will let you create a dvd with multiple video_ts folders (with menu), but it will not let you shrink to fit before burning, which is just plain stupid as it will shrink to fit almost every other option. I have encoded many dvds using popcorn and the free handbrake software produces much higher quality video files, there really is no reason to own popcorn.

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