More popcorn please!

One of the staples with Mac users has been Roxio‘s Toast, the can-do CD/DVD burner software that’s been around since God created CD and DVD burners, but folk who just need the video burning aspects of the app can turn to a more specialized application from Roxio: Popcorn.

Currently at Version 2.0, this little app can convert video to useful formats and burn them, as well as make copies of DVDs (within legal parameters, of course) and all sorts of little things, but it has always been pretty basic and has left people wanting more.

They’re getting it now with Popcorn 3, the latest version of the app, to be available on shelves later this month. Some of the nice improvements are not too useful for us outside the United States (TiVo support, for one), and those hardware-challenged among us (non-EyeTV owners), but the other improvements are pretty appealing:

• the ability to pause and resume encoding
• increased content limit to 4 hours per DVD (from 2 hours previously)
• support for the Turbo.264 encoder, which lessens strain on the CPU
• mix together different video formats on one DVD and create menus
• uses Quicktime 7.2 for faster processing and better quality
• the aforementioned TiVo support and compatibility with ElGato’s EyeTV

With these improvements, Popcorn 3 is seriously encroaching on other similar apps’ turf, including Roxio’s own Toast. It will be available in a couple of weeks, and will cost US$30 to upgrade from previous versions. A new user will have to pony up US$50.

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