I know you’re in a bit of trouble right now with the whole worldwide credit crunch thing, but allowing me to update my phone numbers still doesn’t really count as an “offer”.

The disaster that is Nero

My father has rather a lot of camcorder tapes going back to the early 90s from three camcorders, an old analog Hi8 which was discarded due to it breaking and a Sony DCR-TRV120E Digital8 which we still have. At this was starting to deteriorate, a Canon HV20, which uses HDV, was purchased. The plan was to use the firewire output on both cameras to capture the video and turn it into a DVD as a backup.

My father has previous tried to use the Nero 8 “super ultimate edition” (or whatever it’s called) trial to convert the tapes to DVD, but he found that it took forever, and then didn’t burn the disk properly. We reinstalled his computer, which didn’t help, and contacted Nero technical support. They didn’t help either, as they didn’t reply. Apparently they don’t care about people who are using the trial version who are having problems.

I decided to capture the DV using WinDV, but then use Nero 9 (a massive 380MB, plus .NET 3.0) to do the processing, i.e. turning it into a DVD. This worked a few times, but then just stopped working. It would spend an hour or two encoding the video, then suddenly decide that it couldn’t burn it, generating the following error.

[02:00:34] DVDEngine SEH EXCEPTION (0xC0000005: ACCESS_VIOLATION) was raised in NEEM2V.DLL at RVA 0x00025342.


Great. Well, rather than waste my life trying to debug Windows and Nero, I decided to find another solution, mostly using tools I’d already used before.

An alternative solution using free utilities

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