First Look: Roxio Popcorn 3 Adds iPhone Support, TivoToGo
UPDATE, 11/16/07: Roxio has updated Popcorn 3 to fix several Leopard compatibility issues. More about Popcorn’s update for Leopard at Roxio’s website.
Later this month, Roxio is releasing an upgrade to Popcorn, its popular desktop DVD burning and video conversion client for the Mac. Popcorn 3 features support for the iPhone and Apple TV, better video quality settings and TiVoToGo functionality, all wrapped in a freshly redesigned user interface. It costs $50 for a full version and $30 for owners of previous versions. It’s well worth the upgrade, especially if you have an iPhone or a TiVo, or if you’re already a Popcorn fan. Popcorn 3 ships to customers in the U.S. and Canada the last week of August, and to Europe and Asia in September.
Roxio vice president of product management Vito Salvaggio walked us through a demo of Popcorn 3 and gave us a copy to test out. This is our first look.
Popcorn does more than just copy and burn DVDs. Take a quick mental inventory of the videos on your hard drive and think about all of the ways you could possibly want to watch them. Chances are, Popcorn can do it for you. It burns DVDs for conventional players, optimizes videos for handhelds and transcodes videos for playback on consoles, all the while giving you total control over file size, quality, resolution and file formats.
Of course, Popcorn’s most useful feature is its ability to take any video — a DVD image, VIDEO_TS folder, DivX file, H.264 or any flavor of MPEG — and create a DVD that will play in a conventional DVD player. It will build menus and handle the conversion settings automatically, so you can just drag a bunch of .avis or .mpegs into the app’s DVD creator interface and click "Go." Of course, you can also customize your DVD menus and your compression settings if you’d like. Popcorn can fit around 4 hours of video on a single-layer disc, and it has support for dual-layer drives.
Also, if you rip a DVD, you usually end up with roughly 8 or 9 gigabytes of raw data. Popcorn has a feature called Fit-to-DVD which compresses that ripped data down to exactly the right size to fill a 4.7GB DVD. The feature is a total life-saver — it eliminates the guesswork and maximizes the video quality of the finished product by applying just the right amount of compression.
So, what’s new in the latest version? Roxio has added the iPhone and AppleTV to its list of supported devices, which includes the iPod, PSP, Xbox 360, BlackBerry and PlayStation 3. It’s also added a new batch conversion feature, which you’ll be familiar with if you use Roxio Crunch. You can set a bunch of videos to convert, then walk away and go do more important things while Popcorn chugs. Also, if you want to interrupt Popcorn 3 while it’s compressing video to do a few chores on your Mac, you can now pause the process and restart it later. Video compression takes up a sizable chunk of time and computing resources, so these are welcome features.
There’s also a new video quality preview that gives you a 15-second peek at what your compressed video will look like using your chosen settings.
TiVo fans will be happy to know the new Popcorn now has TivoToGo built in. The technology lets TiVo owners transfer recordings from their set top DVR to their Mac, then burn a set of TiVo’d shows to a DVD or convert them for playback on any of the supported devices — Yep, you can put TiVo recordings on your iPhone. There’s also an auto-convert option that automatically pulls saved content off of your TiVo, transcodes it, then dumps it into iTunes or some other pre-determined location. You can set it up to run all of the coversions while you sleep, then wake up to an iPhone full of Dancing With the Stars. It’s a total snap.
Previously, Mac users could only get the TiVoToGo component as part of Toast 8, which was announced at Macworld in January, 2007 and costs $100. Popcorn 3 is only half the price, but it lacks Toast’s ability to also burn audio or data sessions and its support for Blu-Ray discs.
