Media Suite 9 Ultra

Other sites have mixed reviews. I purchased the CyberLink Media Suite 9 Ultra V.9 directly from the company site as I wanted to do a download. If you look at all the ads, you will see all these wonderful features with the suite version 9 being the newest. Well, yes and no. Cyberlink does not make any false claims that I have found, but unless you've bought the package you won't know you are NOT getting the newest and best even though the comparison tables show nothing newer because this is the newest version of the suite but the individual products the "newest menu" calls are anything but the newest. In many places this is referred to as the error of omission. I spent a couple of hours looking at reviews and site comparisons and never once saw anyone mention this shortcoming. The most critical pieces are not even close to the newest versions, you have to run a whole series of updates and that's when you may discover that you've gotten something different than you expected because that will be the first time you see considerably newer versions which you must purchase versus update. The software has performed better than the reviewers elsewhere who report frequent crashes, but that may be because I have a relatively high end system (W7, x64, 8gb ram, I5 750, 2.7 Ghz, quad) that converted a standard definition recording all the way to DVD with flexible disc space matching in about 20 minutes. The glitches seem to be that the interface and visual menus are poorly done and it's extremely difficult to back up to previous menus as well as screen objects overlaying other objects. Also, what was the last time you couldn't run a program in full screen mode when the product is all about video? From the best I can figure out so far, even though I bought the newest suite, I will still have to lay out about double again what I already paid just to get the most recent versions of what I just purchased. I may have opted for a high end product had I known that the company was going to charge you over and over to get what you really thought you were buying to start with. Does it work? Better than many of my not perfectly new Sony, Ulead, and Roxio video products. Was it a bargain? Hardly! Given that Amazon does a pretty good job of getting honest ads and helping customers with defective products, I'd certainly like to see Amazon mandate full disclosure on underlying versions in any suite type software. If money wasn't an issue, I'd buy this again. But since for most of us total price matters, I have serious doubts I would have made the purchase with full information.

This program closes every time I set up data to record. It doesn't crash and close until you spend lots of time making a file list to burn to disc. No you can't save the file -that just crashes it too.
I paid extra for my blu-ray burner to get this software with it. No worky, no recourse, just left holding the bag. It's getting to be a sneaky world out there. Companies are knowingly selling crap and getting away with it. So I downloaded BurnAware for FREE and it works flawlessly, without any fuss. In fact now that I've tried burnaware, I would rather used it than this piece of crap even if it worked. It has better features that don't mis-read your files.

› Go to Amazon.com to see both reviews  1.5 out of 5 stars