Adaptec VideOh! DVD offers an attractive price ($149.99 direct) and competent hardware, but the software bundle is mismatched. Sonic MyDVD Video Suite 4 is a capable authoring program with many strong features. The ArcSoft ShowBiz video editor, however, is a poor choice for anything other than the simplest of projects.

The VideOh! hardware contains on-board MPEG-2 encoding but no analog output port, so it can't write projects to tape. On our audio/video synchronization test its results were perfect, and quality was on a par with that of other units.

Converting tape to DVD is simple though not as fast as with ADS Instant DVD 2.0, because MyDVD first stores the video on the hard drive, then builds the required assets and menus, then records. MyDVD's strengths include an excellent slide show function that can rotate images, add transitions, and synchronize slide duration to a background audio track. MyDVD can also save your original digital pictures on the recorded DVD, a nice archival feature.

We also like the ability to add submenus to a main DVD menu, a navigational capability unavailable in the bundles from ADS or AVerMedia. Like Ulead DVD MovieFactory 2.1 SE, MyDVD can edit previously recorded projects by recovering the original assets from the disc, but it works with only those created by OpenDVD-compliant programs.

MyDVD does have its weaknesses. You can't create chapter points after capture, and you can't render one project to both VideoCD (VCD) and DVD; you have to create one project for each format. And although the MyDVD and ShowBiz combination achieved the fastest time in the production of our long project, you can't leave in the middle, because MyDVD's rendering functions aren't automated.

The Achilles' heel in the Adaptec bundle is ShowBiz. For starters, the ShowBiz UI can't stretch beyond 800 by 600 pixels, which is very confining on most modern displays. The program's trimming capabilities are severely limited, and slicing up our 54-minute source video was a slow process. On older machines (such as our 1-GHz Pentium III), working with MPEG-2 source video was very sluggish, so much so that the machine was almost unusable.

The VideOh! DVD hardware is up to the task of converting analog to digital, and the MyDVD package is a good choice for authoring. If you don't mind replacing ShowBiz with a better video editor (see our comments on Pinnacle Studio 8), this bundle might work for you.