Blaze Media Pro

Wow, it's been a long time since I have used this software but Blaze Media player used to be my media manager of choice. I have since moved on to other media managers but the ones I currently use just don't offer the same flexibility or all of the options that Blaze Media pro does so I decided it was time to revisit the software. They allow you to download a 15-day trial version over at the website, linked to below, so I decided I would check it out and see what Mystik Media has in store for us now with the latest version.

Here's some info from Mystik on Blaze Media Pro, then I can go on about my own review:

Formats supported for audio conversion include CD, MP3, WAV, WMA, OGG, MPEG-4, AIFF, M4A, AAC, AC3, FLAC, and ALAC, and two-way conversions among MPEG-1, MPEG-2, AVI, WMV, ASF, Flash (SWF and FLV), iPod, PSP, 3GP, and MOV are available for video. MPEG options are available for VCD, SVCD, and DVD compliant output. DVD ripping, and audio compression functionality are also present. When converting from audio CD, track information can be dynamically downloaded from the CDDB and used to automatically name saved files.

Video editing is available for AVI (uncompressed), AVI (compressed using any available codec), MPEG-1, MPEG-2, WMV, and ASF. Comprehensive video editing operations are provided (delete frame, delete selection, crop, resize, rotate, mirror, flip, trim, text overlay, adjust audio volume, etc.). In addition, an extensive list of over 30 effects and color adjustment operations allow for powerful video enhancement and alternation. WAV, WMA, and MP3 audio files can be inserted into the video or extracted from the video; and BMP, GIF, JPG, PCX, PNG, RAS, PPM, TGA, and TIF are the supported image formats that can be inserted or extracted.

The download is only about 18 megs which is a snap if you are on a broadband connection. If not, what are you doing downloading software anyway?

Anyhow, the installation program is pretty straightforward...and quick, even on my laggy PC.

After the install it of course prompted me to run it or not, which I did. Here is the initial screen.

The program itself is even easier to use than I remember and they have added a ton of options as well. Blaze Media Pro is a converter, burner, includes audio and video editing software which support a ton of formats including MP3, WAV, OGG, AVI, WMA and MPEG-1 and 2 as well as WMV.

In addition to being an audio/video editor you can also convert to and from different formats and burn DVDs or CDs. It's a snap to use to convert DVD to AVI, MPG, WMV with Blaze. Since I like to save all of my movies to the hard drive for my HTPC converting the DVDs to a smaller size is a must-have and being able to use one piece of software instead of two or three to get the same required results is even better.

You can also use Blaze as a DVD burning software. Although I prefer to keep everything online I also like to have a hard copy offline in case something goes wrong or for when I build a new PC. It's not often that you can get a CD burning software in addition to all of the other stuff for a pretty low price.

All in all I like it so far. I will keep it around for another week or two and weigh it against the other products I have been using for DVD conversion such as Divx and see how it stacks up. So far so good though.