I got the Creative Suite some years back when I was doing multimedia for work and even then it seemed like Encore wouldn’t cease from giving me trouble. Now, years later, I’ve returned to experimenting with it as it’s the only readily available tool for blu-ray authoring even though Adobe has pretty much discontinued it. Sure enough, I’ve been having plenty of issues and I haven’t even made the big financial leaps I intend to in the near future.

I have yet to purchase a blu-ray burner, something I’ve been meaning to do for awhile, but I’ve been doing tests on standard DVDs with surprisingly mixed results of successful/unsuccessful. Wasting blank DVDs is one thing, but once I’ve spent considerable money on a burner and 50GB BD-Rs (I’m going to want large storage space), experimenting with high expectancy of failure won’t be as practical. Looking around, I see I’m not the only one who has had issues with successful burns in Encore. That being said, I don’t really want to spend even more money on something like Toast if I can assure myself that I have a reliable authoring program already.

Admittedly, my computer hardware is not the newest or the best for multimedia. I’ve seen Encore mentioned around here a few times, so I’d like to ask has anyone actually has success, recently, with Encore, not only in authoring, but also with the actual burning? Are there any specific things you do to make it work? What kind of media files do you use with it? Should I just give up using this to avoid (or at least lessen) the inevitable further headaches that I will have while getting these films on hard copy? Are there other, more preferable programs?

Thank you.