CD burner & DVD player software suggestion?

[Kernix]

I have Dell's Sonic Cineplayer (DVD program) and Roxio CD creator on my PC (Win XP). Cineplayer locks up my PC sometimes, and when creating a CD of pics for clients, Roxio causes an error. Basically, IMO they're crap.

Can anyone suggest a program, or programs, for both purposes?

For DVD reviews, PowerDVD comes up as one of the tops; for CD burners, Nero comes up as one of the tops but unfortunately, so does Roxio.

Any help appreciated being that I just got the complete DVD series of Farscape and can't wait to watch it. And I don’t mind paying for the programs, and actually prefer it to freeware.

Jim

 

[clarinetJWD]

For CD burning, I use either ImgBurn or InfraRecorder. Both are free, and very good, burning pretty much whatever you want quickly. I used Nero for a long time, but it's quite expensive for simple burning tasks, and incredibly bloated and slow. Roxio is the same, but not as good. For single function type programs, the way to go is almost always free and/or open source.

For DVD playback, I truly believe that Windows Media Center is the best interface, but that only is available with XP Media Center Edition, Vista, or Windows 7 (Really, there's no reason to not get 7 at this point, but I digress. Also, I like Media Center because it consolidates all my locally stored videos, TV shows, recorded TV, music, pictures, as well as streaming Netflix, hulu, and YouTube along with DVD playback, but for just DVD playback rather than a complete living room solution, free is better). As far as Cineplayer, PowerDVD and all the rest of these paid suites, they all suck. I have CyberLink's PowerDVD and Arcsoft's Total Media Theatre (Arcsoft TMT is better), but only because I needed software that could do Blu-Ray/HD-DVD. Try VideoLAN's VLC player. It's also free, and while it's completely no-frills, it will play pretty much any format, and it's also completely free.