If you make DVD or Blu-ray discs, then you may well have encountered issues with discs that don’t play properly, or at all. One frequently offered bit of advice is to use a third party program called ImgBurn for the final stage of creating a disc, rather than rely on routines in Pinnacle Studio.
Apart from the fact that it is, in my experience, considerably more reliable that any other burning program I’ve tried, it also has a verify feature, which tests the discs as you create them, weeding out any poor burns caused by faults in the discs you are using, or caused by your ageing burner. Another feature of ImgBurn is that you can use it to “fake” DVD-Rom discs, a process called Bit Setting, which can fool players that reject burnt discs of any sort. This last feature requires a certain type of burner so I won’t discuss it here.
So why doesn’t everyone use ImgBurn? The main reason appears to be that a number of virus checkers won’t let you download it, or give severe warnings about it. That’s not the case with Microsoft’s own virus checking, but they aren’t in the business of trying to frighten people. The only problem with ImgBurn is that if you download it from the official website and don’t take a bit of care when you install it, you could end up with Potentially Unwanted Programs – most likely added to your Internet browser. So if you are the sort of person who can’t be trusted to read instructions, perhaps you should stay away from the official ImgBurn download site – which is HERE.
In one post on the ImgBurn forum the author of the program details how you can extract the main program from the installer, thus avoiding the issue of PUPs – his attempt at getting some remuneration for all his work. I’ve done that and made the raw program available. If your right click on this link: HERE and “Save Link as” (Firefox, Chrome and Edge) or “Save Target as” (Internet Explorer) you can save the file into your download folder. Put it on your desktop, then double-click on the icon to run it. If this feels a bit like piracy to you, then you can make a donation to the author (as I’ve done).
If you want some help using ImgBurn, you can download a PDF that I made in 2011 from HERE, showing how to use it with Studio 14. If you want to use it with NGStudio, then you can also create ISO files for DVD projects, which makes life a bit easier. If you want a more comprehensive set of guides, including how to go about Bit Setting, then visit the ImgBurn guides HERE.