DVD Burners, Roxio, and Crap...oh my

Okay...some background...

Bought a Plextor DVD burner (model 708A). This is the 8X burner. Oddly enough, the drive could not even recognize the DVD that came with it that was loaded with software! Tried everything, finally decided to bring it back to the store at which I purchased it (Costco for those keeping score). They refunded my money and I purchased the Plextor 712A (the 12X burner, 'natch). Lo and behold, this one functions no probs. Load the Plextor Professional software and when it starts up, got the message "An invalid argument was encountered". That's it. No other message number, etc. Sent in a ticket to Plextor and was told to uninstall it, and reinstall it while ensuring that I was logged in as an Administrator. No duh. Thanks for the tip. Wrote back to them but haven't heard anything.

Meanwhile, Roxio has infested my system to the point where by mini-DVD camcorder software thinks that the drive (the camcorder becomes drive H: when I plug it into a USB port) is in use by another app. And, to boot, the Roxio DVD Builder won't preview any mpegs. It will load them into a DVD project, but won't preview them (like it is supposed to do).

So, I trundle on off to www.roxio.com. But wait, I can't open a Tech Support ticket because my pre-packaged software didn't come with a TLSID number. Isn't that nice. I have to contact the drive manufacturer, Plextor. Yay.

I do that, then check out Roxio's Discussion board. Frightening stuff, really. They actually expect people to BUY this software? Fuck that. From what I have seen there are thousands of serious bugs with their software...and their response is to tell joe user to purchase the upgrade to Easy Creator 7. Huh huh. Will do that....when pigs fly.

If you are a software developer who makes a piece of crap software package that doesn't work, don't expect to charge people for the "upgrade" to fix it.

I'm off to my neighbourhood hacker-type to get a pirated version of Easy Creator 7. If that doesn't work, I will get a pirated copy of as many DVD burning software titles I can find. WHEN I find one that works, THEN I will shell out $$ to buy it. Until then Roxio can blow me.

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