TecKMagazine - Roxio Popcorn 4 Review

Roxio Popcorn 4 Review

Written by Don Lee
Tuesday, 30 March 2010
Roxio Popcorn 4 has come a long way since its debut. While the program is known for its DVD video copying and conversion, Roxio has decided to take it to the next level of sharing and converting even more video in Popcorn 4. While the core DVD copying and conversion features have been kept, the program does sport a fresh new interface and some very useful features for some of the latest technologies. In case you weren’t familiar with the three previous versions of Popcorn, this program provides the ability to copy DVD content (not rip copyrighted material) and other video content. It does have DVD video compression capabilities, audio track extraction and video conversion. I’ve always been enamored with this product because it does a lot of the dirty work that the typical video consumer would utilize. Some video conversion products try to be the end all but Popcorn 4 just handles the most popular uses and formats that consumers use most. Roxio has taken Popcorn 4 to the next level of content creation and publishing. While the program has always served as a reliable DVD copying application, this version provides more direct access to popular services such as YouTube and Tivo. The program’s ability to export to the Flash FLV format is also very handy. Not only can Popcorn 4 export video into this universal format, but the export also includes the source code and file too. So now you don’t have to remember what the Flash player code tags to embed your video. The program will provide you with everything you need to either place on a page or just add it to your site. A strange but welcomed feature is the scheduling capability. If you have ever processed video for any reason, you know how long the process takes. You always try to make sure everything is set perfectly before you press that processing button. In Popcorn 4, you can schedule your video processing before you go to bed and the application will take care of the rest. You can even pause and resume a process if you have to for some reason. The Final Word Popcorn 4 is an excellent upgrade from previous versions. I really enjoyed the direct export of video into YouTube. Just select a few options, provide your YouTube username and password and press the big red button in the bottom right of the application and you’re importing videos into YouTube. A very seamless process that works well but I wish that you could add the video title, description and meta tag information from within Popcorn 4. You need to go to your account on the YouTube website to modify that information. The streaming capability from a Mac to Tivo (and vice versa) appears interesting and I can see the option of transferring Tivo content to the Mac being extremely useful. To be able to take recorded content and convert it to portable devices, online services and other uses makes Popcorn 4 even more valuable. The video conversion improvement to mobile devices is very notable. Even on my relatively old MacBook, the video converting is a lot faster. Plus, I noticed that the program no longer has the status bar issue when processing video. Roxio really took the time to improve this application. System Requirements - Macintosh computer with an Intel processor - Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) or 10.6 (Snow Leopard) - QuickTime 7 - Up to 800 MB free disk space to install all components - Up to 15 GB of temporary free disk space during usage There is a lot to like about Popcorn 4 but the best thing is that it is very affordable especially with all of the functionality available. Roxio Popcorn 4 earns 4.5 stars out of 5. Highly Recommended. You can click HERE to purchase Roxio Popcorn 4 for Macintosh. You can learn more about Roxio Popcorn 4 from the company website at http://www.roxio.com .

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