Microsoft Stumbles Again

It never ceases to amaze me how a company like Microsoft—creator and distributor of Windows, the dominant operating system for personal computers in the world today—continues to produce the poorest, most feeble applications for that same operating system.

• Any number of free and readily available text editors (e.g., Jarte, Notepad++, and my personal favorite Win32Pad) run rings around Microsoft's minimalistic Notepad and Wordpad.
  
• Microsoft's imagers (Paint and Windows Picture and Fax Viewer) are similarly bare bones products. They pale in comparison with freeware image editors like FastStone Image Viewer or the fabulous IrfanView.
  
• The Windows archive (i.e., zip file) handling system is not only featureless but downright annoying. If you do not wish to pay for WinZip, you are still much better off with any one of the freebie archive programs 7-Zip, IZArc, or PeaZip.
  
• Even Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) web browser lagged years behind Netscape, Opera, and other web browsers in introducing tabbed browsing. I even used the little-known Avant Browser whenever I needed to use IE because it used the same IE engine yet featured tabs long before IE itself did.
  

The latest Microsoft shortcoming is the Windows DVD Maker. Amazingly, that program ships only on computers with Vista/Windows 7 premium editions or greater. Perhaps that policy is intended to hide Microsoft's embarrassment by withholding it from the majority of users with more basic versions of Windows. It is just difficult for me to imagine how anyone would consider this an enhancement of any kind. Let me explain why.

My wife has a Flip Video Camcorder with 47 videos in mp4 format. She wanted to put those files onto a DVD that can be played on a standard DVD player for viewing on a large-screen television. My new laptop has Windows 7 complete with Windows DVD Maker, so I thought I was all set. However, much to my chagrin, I soon discovered that Windows DVD Maker does not accept mp4 format.

To overcome this shortcoming, I chose one of the larger mp4 files as a test case. I used the free software Pazera Free MP4 to AVI Converter to convert the file to avi format which Windows DVD Maker supposedly does recognize. Sure enough, Windows DVD Maker did convert the video—but it left out the audio portion entirely! A search on Google quickly revealed that this is a common problem: one particular user who tried to process multiple avi files through Windows DVD Maker reported that approximately 40% of his resulting video files had no audio.

Another Google search revealed a life-saver: a free, open source program called DVD Flick. This marvelous program accepts a much wider range of file formats, including both avi and mp4. I then ran both files through DVD Flick for comparison purposes. Lo and behold: both resulting DVDs contained the full audio.

Visually, the avi file seemed more pixelated. I do not know if the avi file lost significant data in the conversion process from mp4 or if avi files are just inherently more pixelated than corresponding mp4 files. That is a secondary concern; what matters most is that DVD Flick radically outperformed Microsoft's lame Windows DVD Maker by recognizing a greater variety of file formats and providing infinitely more reliable audio.

Bottom line: if you are stuck with Windows DVD Maker, do yourself a big favor. Download and install the far more robust and versatile DVD Flick.

You'll be glad you did.