Inexpensive box captures analog video for Mac users.

On the front of the Instant DVD hardware unit is a set of analog inputs, and the back panel hosts composite and S-Video inputs.

USB Instant DVD from ADS Technologies is an inexpensive system for capturing analog video through a USB port to create MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 movies. This allows consumers or video pros with limited budgets to hook up anything from composite and S-Video sources and make DVDs. The system also creates MPEG-1 movies for web or CD-ROM delivery.

I tested the Mac version of USB Instant DVD on a 1.2GHz dual-processor PowerMac G4 with a 125GB internal drive, and a 1GHz Titanium G4 PowerBook with a 60GB drive. These are high-end Apple systems with amazing features and delicious build quality, but USB Instant DVD also operates on more humble Macs. For test playback of ADS Technologies' MPEG-2 demo, I used a 500MHz G4. G3 software is also provided.

The hardware component is essentially an external box that connects to your Mac, powered by a small DC power adapter. The adapter is designed for 100VAC to 120VAC. This prevents using the system in the UK or elsewhere abroad where the power is normally 240V without a step-down transformer. (All of Apple's laptops and computer equipment sense incoming voltages and adapt automatically.) ADS says that units distributed in other countries have the appropriate transformer.

The main box that does all the A-to-D magic is only about 8"×4.25"×2", about the size of a DSL modem. A thermostatically controlled fan whirs on to circulate air around sensitive components.

On the front is one set of analog audio and video inputs for quick hookups, but the back panel has more connectivity. You'll find two standard RCA jacks for composite video in and out, or use the S-Video jacks. To the far right on the back panel is a single USB port, and two miniature stereo audio jacks reside on the opposite end. ADS thoughtfully provides custom mini-plug adapter cables that terminate in RCA connectors. You also get a USB cable — something not always provided by manufacturers — and an S-Video cable.

Installation is very simple. Connect the power adapter to the main box, run a single USB into the Mac, and connect your video equipment to the appropriate ports. You can also connect an NTSC monitor up to the system for playback.

The first box sent from ADS had problems. Picture would digitize smoothly, but the audio would stutter, snap, and totally drop out after about 10 seconds. On subsequent attempts, there was no sound. After trying it on three different Macs, I ended up diagnosing this as a hardware problem with the box. The second box showed up at my door the next day and worked fine. The hardware carries a one-year warranty.

USB Instant DVD's software is designed for OS X and seemed to work fine in the latest version, 10.2 Jaguar. (A Windows version of Instant DVD has already been shipping for about a year.) It does not work in OS 9.2, and no drivers are provided for operation in Classic mode.

The manual suggests that you install the software merely by clicking on the disk icon and selecting the Duplicate command in the File menu. Normally, a Mac user would simply drag only the needed software to the hard disk. There is no long installation process when software bits are automatically written to disk in various places. If you use the Duplicate command, you end up copying all the data from the disk, which includes the software for G3s as well as G4s. The whole package is about 270MB. An MPEG-2 demo from ADS uses over 100MB of that space, so once you've seen it you can delete it.

Designed by Pixela in Japan, the software interface is functional and stable, but clunky in its design. You have to click on buttons to display menus, instead of using the OS X menu bar. Once you launch PixeDV, it completely takes over the screen, and you can't run anything else while capturing video and sound. The interface even covers the OS X menu bar and the dock. Once you open PixeDV you're committed until you click Quit.

PixeDV has a capture mode called Capty, an Album mode for organizing clips, a very basic MPEG editor, an Import function, and two independent areas to play either QuickTime or MPEG movies. It would have been helpful if a few of these functions had been combined into one area, as some are very basic. In some respects, PixeDV acts like a web browser where everything is on a separate page.

For example, if you simply want to delete a clip after having digitized it, you have to flip to Album mode, select the clip, and then use the Delete command in a pulldown menu underneath yet another button. You should be able to click on a clip and hit Delete within Capty mode.

Capty mode has a capture window with a big Start button underneath. Click the Start button, and video and sound are written to disk in realtime as you watch it play within the window. I used a Sony MiniDV camcorder as an S-Video source. Later I tried a Sony DSR-1 DVCAM deck for better quality. The digitized video looked good. I did get one glitch in the middle of a clip, but in subsequent attempts everything ran smoothly. The little box was doing its job.

You can't see your video in the preview window until you're actually about two seconds into a clip, so you need an NTSC monitor or your camcorder viewfinder for previewing your tapes to find the right spot. The settings mode allows all the normal color adjustments, but this is difficult to use because you can't see the results in realtime. You need to be able to see your video playing in the window and adjust it as you're watching it. That's a feature that ADS says it wants to include in later versions.

The lack of simple audio meters or a basic waveform monitor makes the digitizing process a bit vague, but this is a very inexpensive package.

There are settings for enabling either the composite or S-Video connectors on the box, as well as for whether you want to capture MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 video. The various options for the MPEG types appear on this palette — including audio sample rate, picture size, fixed or variable compression — as appropriate to either mode. Once you get used to the oddities of the software, the hardware does a pretty decent job of digitizing picture and sound, resulting in relatively good-quality video.

Album mode lets you view and create collections of video clips, name them, and preview them in either the MPEG or QuickTime windows. There's an option to make the thumbnails large or small. A helpful button grabs still frames within a clip and saves them in the Album.

You can opt to display data about each clip in a window off to the side of the Album. I would have rather seen the data displayed either under each clip or in an optional text view, like an Avid bin or as Final Cut Pro does. The text window is too far away from your clip for convenience if you're using a large monitor.

Unlike almost any Mac app for video, you cannot lasso clips to select groups of them, and you must either shift-click to select groups or select all of them at once. In Control Key mode other options become available when you hold down Control while clicking on a clip. Finally, you can't simply click on the title of a clip to rename it unless you use the text window to the side.

The MPEG Cutter/Editor within PixeDV is useful for truncating a file and trimming its in and out points so that it's exactly the desired length. Though not a true editing program, the MPEG Cutter/Editor is helpful for preparing clips for the Internet or preparing a DVD for burning.

The smaller MPEG-1 movies look terrific, and the MPEG-2 movies also played fine once I got the replacement hardware from ADS. While you can run this system on a slower Mac — even G3 systems — I had trouble playing back the sample video on my older 500MHz G4 without a dropped frame here or there. On the faster Macs, it looked much smoother.

I am indeed impressed by the relatively low cost of this package and its ambitious attempts to provide a lot of features. USB Instant DVD also features a simple media browser, the ability to export to NTSC, and DVD preparation tools that include a small app for button creation. However, the software looks as if it were thrown together in a hurry, almost like beta software, with candy-like buttons that should have been menus. While you can get your work done using this software, performing simple tasks is usually an overly tedious process. It's a lot of clicking, clicking, and more clicking.

Quite unusual in a finished piece of software, obvious typos are everywhere. There are misspelled words within dropdown menus, and applications have different names in different places within the program.

Further frustration comes from illogical navigation. To move from viewing an MPEG movie back to the Album mode, where all of your movies reside, you click Cancel instead of something more appropriate like a reverse arrow. On my first attempts, I was afraid that if I hit Cancel I'd be transported out of the program. The glassy buttons light up when you roll over them, an attempt at the Mac's Aqua interface.

But it would have been more appropriate, if not simpler, to use the menu bar to access most functions. These eccentricities and others give the whole package more the feel of a toy or a consumer Windows product than something a Mac user would take seriously. It's unfortunate because some may miss out on the hardware's serious potential after trying out the unpolished software.

A quick glance at Apple's own streamlined interfaces for iDVD, iTunes, iPhoto, or iMovie shows what other apps need to measure up to. They need to be compact, elegant, and intuitive — not unnecessarily complicated with a lot of features that might never be used.

On the bright side, PixeDV has a few higher-end features that increase the value of the package, like the ability to select fixed or variable-rate compression and to switch between composite and S-Video ports. If you need a cheap system for importing decent MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 movies from analog sources — and you can overlook a few significant ergonomic failings — then this package is for you. If you're trying to master DVDs that someone might evaluate critically, USB Instant DVD might be too lightweight. In any case, it wouldn't be a costly mistake to have it around.

I asked ADS if version 2 of the software, which should be available by the time you read this, would address some of the interface issues. Version 2 mostly focuses on PAL video capture, and the interface will look much the same.