Roxio Crunch Reviewer's Comments

Roxio is notorious for producing good quality products and Crunch for Windows is no exception. Based on the popular Mac version, the interface is sleek and easy-to-use. You simply choose which files from your hard drive or disk drive to convert and select which of Apple’s products to convert to. This is one of the few products we reviewed that expanded it’s conversion options to Apple TV, iPhone as well as the iPod.

Crunch can convert a variety of common formats like AVI, DivX, and MOV. You can also batch convert or output directly to iTunes. However, it’s conversion speed is significantly slower than most of the products we reviewed. It took almost an hour and a half to convert a 104 minute film. Average for most competing products is about an hour.

The quality of both DVD and Video were comparable to the other programs we reviewed. However, we found an interesting shaky quality to the copy, but this is only noticed if the video is enlarged. On an iPod screen it’s hardly noticeable.

We found Crunch to be an excellent choice for those placing home videos on their Apple devices; however, you can only convert unencrypted DVDs into the program. This means you cannot copy most major motion pictures onto your iPod using Crunch. Although this isn’t an unusual feature, most software that places copy restrictions are compatible, in some way, with third-party decryptors. We tried two popular decryptors, that run in the background of the computer, and Crunch still refused to convert an encrypted movie.

In order to place an encrypted movie into the Crunch program you would have to rip the movie to your hard drive using a separate DVD ripper, with a decoder, than place the file into Crunch and convert it from there. The whole process takes about two hours.

Overall, Roxio Crunch for Windows is a decent program, abet slow. However, we know that the inability to decrypt or work with third-party decryption software, without ripping the movie to your hard drive first, makes this program difficult to use, and undesirable for most.