National Television System(s) Committee (NTSC) and Phase Alternation Line (PAL) are the television picture encoding formats using in different countries and territories. NTSC is used in Japan, Americas and some other places. PAL is widely used in Asia. Appendix A of our user manual lists the video format used in different countries and territories.

Most of the NTSC players cannot play PAL discs, and most of the NTSC televisions do not accept PAL input. On the other hand, most of the DVD players available in PAL countries support both NTSC and PAL.

If you are going to send the DVD overseas, you should consider using the video format of the disc recipient's country instead of your home country. If you are not sure what video format should be used, you may try using NTSC as most of the DVD systems can accept NTSC DVD.

Please verify whether the temporary folder is pointing to the drive with sufficient space and access rights. The system puts intermediate work files (most likely up to some gigabytes) in this folder. The location of temporary folder can be found and modified in File->Preferences.

Below is a rough estimation on the temporary disk space required:

• First 30 minutes of video: 2GB
• Subsequent every 30 minutes of video: 1GB

Exif stands for "Exchangeable image file format". It was written by the Japan Electronics and Information Technology Industries Association. The Exif specification defines the interchange information (such as shooting date/time, camera settings like aperture, shutter speed, etc) stored in image file.  At present, photos taken by most of the digital cameras contain Exif information.

IPTC stands for "International Press Telecommunications Council".   The IPTC provides news exchange formats to the news industry, and creates and maintains sets of topics to be assigned as metadata values to news objects like photographs.  A subset of the IPTC "Information Interchange Model - IIM" was adopted as the "IPTC Headers" for Photoshop, JPEG and TIFF image files.

Windows Explorer supports displaying the Exif data. Simply put the mouse over an image file to have a quick view on some of the Exif information. Alternatively, you may choose "View"->"Choose Details...", or "Right Click" the title bar to display selected Exif information for all pictures in the folder.

If you want to view all Exif data in an image file, you will need an imaging application. In the web, there are some freeware that could view all Exif data in a JPEG or TIFF picture.

Please check the existence of the picture. You can view the file path under 'Details View'.

If the picture is stored in a network drive or other computer, please also check the network connection.

Once the picture is available, the system will refresh the thumbnail automatically. Alternatively, you may also click the Refresh button on the toolbar to refresh all thumbnails of the selected slideshow.

Yes, you can. When pictures are added to a blank slideshow, the system will automatically choose the first picture to be the slideshow icon and album cover picture. To choose another picture, move the mouse pointer to that picture and click the right mouse button ("Right Click"). Then select 'Set as slideshow thumbnail' in the pop up menu.

Yes, you can. Select the slideshow. Then click on the slideshow name, or press function key 'F2', or select 'Rename' in the right-click pop up menu.

Yes, there are many ways to re-order your pictures and slideshows. The simplest way is to drag-and-drop the thumbnails and/or slideshow icon to the designated location.

Refer our user manual for details.

Yes. Mark the pictures to be moved, and then drag-and-drop them to the designated slideshow icon.

If you drag-and-drop the selected pictures to any blank area of the slideshow panel, DVD Album Creator will then create a new slideshow and relocate the selected pictures to this new slideshow.

DVD Album Creator provides the several ways to synchronize the audio and video within a slideshow so that both of them finish at the same time. These include:

• Automatically repeat the audio till video ends
• Fade out the audio before the playback ends
• Automatically adjust the playback duration of pictures to match with the audio duration

Refer our user manual for details.

DVD Album Creator supports multiple user profiles. Each log on user will have his/her own profile. If you use a different user ID to log on, then a different profile will be allocated.

In addition, other than the installation and registration processes, DVD Album Creator can be executed by a user ID without "administrator" authority. Considering virus protection and security issues, it is always safer to work with a user without administrator rights than the one with administrator rights.

You may insert a CD audio soundtrack in the below ways:

(1) First insert the CD into the drive. Then view the CD contents using Windows Explorer, and drag-and-drop the soundtrack to the Audio panel of DVD Album Creator.

(2) First insert the CD into the drive. Then select the drive letter in the folder selection panel. The soundtrack will be shown with a suffix '.cda' (the same suffix when you view the contents of the audio CD in Windows Explorer). You may then drag-and-drop the soundtrack to the compilation. The whole process is similar to that of adding audio files in other formats.

Please verify whether the cover of the CD contains the "CDDA" logo. DVD Album Creator extracts soundtracks from CD with "CDDA" logo. If the CD is has the "Copy Controlled" logo instead of the "CDDA" logo, then DVD Album Creator will be unable to extract the soundtrack for you. You will then need to extract the soundtracks to an acceptable format (e.g. MP3) using other software (e.g. Windows Media).

DVD Album Creator will copy the soundtrack from CD to your project folder such that there is no need to re-insert the CD again during subsequent disc compilation.  You can locate filename of the soundtrack in the 'Audios' tag under 'Photos & Audios' panel.

If the soundtrack is no more needed, you may remove it from the project folder to release the disk space.

There are numerous resources in the web discussing pan and zoom in video, and we think they are also applicable in compiling the slideshow:

• http://pblmm.k12.ca.us/TechHelp/VideoHelp/aGoodStuffToKnow/Camera_movement.html
• http://www.ruralheritage.com/video_arena/event.htm
• http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/short/gramtv.html
• http://research.microsoft.com/scg/papers/Photostory.pdf

In general, we would recommend:

• Slow pan and zoom
• Do not zoom in and then follow a zoom out
• Do not change both pan direction and zoom direction between images
• In general, use pan and zoom sparingly

Introductory Video will only play once (and only once) right after the DVD is inserted to the DVD player. In most of the commercial DVDs, the introductory video is the copyright statement. It cannot be skipped or fast forward.

Beginning Credits will be played whenever a slideshow is played. If the slideshow is not selected, then the beginning credits will not be played. On the other hand, if the slideshow is played more than once, the beginning credits will also be played more than once.

• Log on an account with administrator rights
• Open 'Control Panel'
• Open 'Regional and Language Options'
• Click the tag 'Advanced'
• In the choice 'Select a language to match the language version of non-Unicode programs you want to use', select your desired language

Then you should be able to customize nearly all text in the playback to your desired language.  This includes the button captions of various menus, slideshow name, subtitles, and titles and credits.

When DVD Album Creator is launched, DVD Album Creator will detect the eligible burners and compile the burner list. If your burner is engaged during our burner detection, DVD Album Creator may not be able to show it in the burner list.

You may instruct DVD Album Creator to refresh the list of eligible burner simply by clicking the drop-down button of the burner list. Alternatively, you may save your project and then re-launch DVD Album Creator to refresh the burner list.

Another possibility is that your burner is not supported by our built in burning engine. In this case, please send us the make and model of your burner so that we will try to arrange an upgrade.

Please note that the burner list only contains eligible DVD burner. Other devices (for example, CD burner, DVD-ROM) will not be included in the burner list.

The built-in disc burning engine of DVD Album Creator supports most of the DVD burner and disc types. To ensure compatibility between DVD Album Creator and your DVD burner, please create one (or more) DVD using our trial version before you make the purchase.

In case DVD Album Creator cannot recognize your burner, you are welcomed to send the make and model of your burner to us. We will try to arrange upgrade of the built-in burning engine.

Alternatively, DVD Album Creator supports generating the DVD file system to a destination folder. You may then burn the DVD using other DVD-Video burning software, for example, Nero.

There are different disc types available in the market, for example, DVD-R/RW, DVD+R/RW. Most probably the player does not support that particular type of disc. For example, most DVD players manufactured before 2002 cannot play DVD+R disc as DVD+R was introduced in mid 2002.

If the DVD player can play a disc of specific disc type which is created by other burning software, and cannot play the disc of same type which is created by DVD Album Creator, please follow the steps shown in our support webpage and submit a support request to us.

If you are playing the DVD using the DVD drive, please check whether Direct Memory Access ("DMA") mode is enabled for the drive. The drive controller consumes a lot of the CPU if your drive is using Programmed Input/Output ("PIO") mode, and this is the common reason of jittering video/audio.

You can find information on checking and changing the DMA mode by searching the word 'DMA mode' in Microsoft website or any search engines. Please note that not all computer DVD drives support 'DMA mode'.

• Trial version is valid for 15 days, and
• The banner 'DVD Album Creator' will be shown in the middle of the video.

Thank you for choosing DVD Album Creator. We will send you login information to the registered user site via email within 1-2 working days after successful completion of your order. You'll need to login the registered user site to obtain your license key(s).

If you do not receive our registration email after some time, please contact us.

In Windows Vista, User Account Control (UAC) and its Admin Approval Mode are enabled by default. When UAC is enabled, local administrator accounts run as standard user accounts. This means that when a member of the local Administrators group logs on, they run with their administrative privileges disabled.

You can logon using the BUILT-IN administrator account (which is disabled on new installations of Windows Vista) to register. Alternatively, read Windows Vista User Account Control Step by Step Guide at http://technet2.microsoft.com/WindowsVista/en/library/0d75f774-8514-4c9e-ac08-4c21f5c6c2d91033.mspx?mfr=true

This guide covers the following scenarios for UAC:

• Scenario 1: Request an application to run elevated one time
• Scenario 2: Mark an application to always run elevated
• Scenario 3: Configure User Account Control

Please follow the instructions in our registration email to retrieve the key.

In the event that the registration email is also lost, please contact us.