ADOBE PLEASE FIX THIS SOFTWARE

Question

I was considering purchasing this software but it is so buggy I cannot begin to express my frustration. Are we beta testers ? Why can't these issues get resolved. I have had the dreadful 0x0000020 error for 3 different projects now during the past day and no i did not uncheck and check "animate buttons". This is a real pain. The solution is to rebuild the dvd every time? How is this software aimed at professionals wanting to create dvds in a business environment. These constant crashes due to this error are unacceptable. What would I say to a client sitting with me waiting for their project to burn? Sorry I have to redo everything please wait? To say that this is an OS problem and alleviate responsibility is not the right thing. I love the idea that this software works with photoshop, I like how it works when it does but authoring dvds in this buggy environment is REAL FRUSTRATING

Answer 1

I'm also extremely frustrated with Encore. It cost me months of unpaid time. It is definetely the buggiest piece of the CS suite and it didn't get any better through all it's versions.
I have been talking to support many times and I got a sack full of bugs confirmed, some of them major bugs that even corrupt files (some weren't fixed for three or four versions.)
Each software has bugs, but teh main problem in Encore is that it just doesn't handle user or internal errors gracefully. It just crashes or hangs. There is no recovery mode or something similar. I definetley can't recommend it if you have to make a living out of it. The chances that you loose a lot of time and money are very high even if you do everything correctly. You might just edit a menu and Encore crashes and corrupts the file - making you have to redo the whole project from scratch.
After I will have finished my current projects, which are already three months delayed, because of Encore bugs I will finally dump Encore and either spend much more money for professional authoring software or might go for Studio Pro on the MAC that I tried recently and had a much better experience with.
The first problem for us customers is that there is no real competitor for the PC. (On the MAC Studio Pro is by length better in stability and features.) So Adobe has no real need to put more effort into Encore.
The second problem is that software is treated differently than any other product. A car manufacture has to face product liability. A software manufacture does not. It must become cheaper for software manufacture to make better software and not the other way around as it is today. I would recommend a law that requires a software vendor to fix reported bugs (behaviour that differs from the specs in the manual) for free in a certain time frame (e.g. 6 weeks) or the customer can deduct a certain amount from the purchased price. If a advertised piece of a programm is not working you should not pay for it. Period. This would make it cheaper for the vendor to develop better software right away. Nowadays all major software vendors use the 5% rule. If a bug is not reported by more than 5% of the user base it won't be fixed. It doesn't matter if the bug is serious or you can't use a feature. (I never forget the nught shifts because Encore corrupted projects when you tried to enter subtitles manually). Nowadays a bug might be fixed in the next version, which the customer has to pay again, even he paid already for a version that should have done it correctly.
Some people say that software becomes so expensive that you can't afford it anymore. I don't think so. Anyway it think it would be better to knwo what you are getting into it and get a piece of software for a couple of hundred dollars and then loose a couple of thousands, because it doesn't work.
I really can understand the frustration of many users that pay real money for Encore and then don't get the value for their money that has been advertised and they expect.