First, let me comment on something that happened during the install of this. The installer looked very modern and smooth, but froze up on me at one point - at least it appeared to be frozen. I decided to give it a few more minutes and when I came back from my break, the installer had finished. It struck me as very odd as I've never had a single program take this long to install, and I've got some big ones on here. I'll come back to this later, but let me go on to the program itself

The program started fine and the layout was pretty straight forward. It gave you nice little selections between the different iPod and AppleTV formats. My only stickler with this is that most programs of this type don't truly optimize the values for different screen formats (16:9 & 2.35:1). They keep the width the same and just crop the height. Seeing that the AppleTV isn't out there yet, it's still nice to see somone giving at least including that format in their program - hopefully with optimizing this later on when the AppleTV is in hand.

Programs such as iSquint and Handbrake offer a similarly intuitive interface, but are free. And programs such as ffmpegX offer much more flexibility at a cheaper price (though ffmpegX is a more complex layout).

One feature I like here is their "PAUSE" button. This is great for laptop users who can't alway keep their machine in one spot and need to put it to sleep to change locations. It is also great for those that need to temporarily gain back their processor usage for something else. I have not seen this in the other programs I mention.

My own quirks & nit-picky observations: I'm aptly labeling this paragraph so you can take it with a grain of salt. These are my subjective observations of a few things on the product. The first thing that made me go, "What?", was the comment that the product does '...200% conversion speed, beyond your imagination.' Uh, OK. Don't know what to say about that. The day someone can crank out video conversion at speeds beyond my imagination, I shall be impressed. I'm not. Next was the fact that this product was labeled version 3.1.9.0131 reminds me of when I first got a check book and started with check #207 so no one would think this was my first check. I am not able to verify if any previous version ever existed. Also, the company website of MP4Converter Software Studio appears to be one of those many video conversion and ripping software sites that I see for PC's. Finally, on the site, I do not see any phone number or address for contact - just a support & sales email address. For such a vast website, I am surprised that there doesn't seem to be a lifeline besides an email contact. Remember, these are only my little observations that made my spidey senses tingle a little bit.

Now back to something that really bothered me. The day after the install, I noticed my computer running rather strange. In fact, I could no longer open "Activity Monitor" which I run almost all the time to see what programs are doing what. When that failed to open, I quickly ran a 'Repair Permissions'. It seems every file on my computer had its permissions corrupted. After the repair, all is running well again.

After having a Mac for 5 years, I have never seen this problem. I have never had more than a few files with corruupt permissions, and I have never had an install that mysteriously ran for 10 minutes without telling me what it was doing.

All and all, I'm going to stay away from this one. Though I really like that PAUSE button.