Review by James John Hollandsworth, M.D.

I was excited about getting and reviewing this product, because I had recently bought an iPhone and wanted a good way to load movies on it. I already been using an earlier version of another Roxio product, Popcorn.

So, let’s say you’re the average person who has a iPod or iPhone and wants to take those DVDs you have in your library and view them on your handheld wonder. Roxio Crunch does that, right? Wrong. The legality of taking a DVD movie you own and making a digital copy for your own personal use is still in a legal gray area, so companies like Roxio won’t touch it, so actually Crunch can’t make copies of any standard copyrighted, copyprotected DVD you buy in a store. Out of the box it’s only good for home-movie DVDs you’ve made yourself. Now, if you can find another program that will copy the DVD onto your computer (into what is known as a video-ts folder), then Crunch will help. Or it was supposed to. I had trouble using it to convert a video ts folder I already had on my computer, and when I emailed their help desk they refused to help me once they learned that the video ts folder was of a copyrighted product. I tried converting another file and it converted, but the video and audio didn’t properly sync. And it gets worse. Crunch is getting heavily promoted, but it is essentially just a stripped down version of Roxio’s flagship product Popcorn 3, which is a much more powerful program for only ten bucks more.

So what did I end up doing? I’m using HandBrake, a downloadable program that performs beautifully, has more options than Crunch, and will work on most copyrighted DVDs to boot. And, oh, it’s free.