We’ve been on that waiting list a couple weeks now and may have to wait even longer. Recently, Zediva was sued.

Nero’s “Burning ROM” (a cute word play on the Emperor Nero’s burning of Rome) lets you copy across discs. If you start out burning data to a DVD and run out of room on the disc, you can continue with other discs. The program lets you switch to CDs, and switch again if you run out of those. (Nero says they have the only program that allows a mixture of different media for one disc burning job.)

If the content you are burning to disc doesn’t fill it up, the program will then duplicate the content across every remaining empty track. This means that if the disc gets scratched and unreadable in one place, the laser reader can usually pick up the content from a track further on.  An “auto-run” feature is included, so when you give the disc to someone, it starts right up.

Burning ROM allows you to encrypt the files you burn to disc and add what’s called a “digital signature.” If someone changes the content and burns it to a new disc, the lack of that signature will prove that it did not come from the original author. This can be important in some business situations.

You’ll probably need to read the help files to do half of the stuff in this program, such as editing your music, or choosing the right kind of format for your video. We just left the default settings in place and were OK.

Burning ROM is $50 from nero.com. You can try it out if you download the free trial version of the $80 three-product “Multimedia 10” suite at Nero.com; this set includes Burning ROM.

Her next question was whether she could use a special “photo converter” she had seen advertised. Or should she buy an ordinary scanner, like our low cost Canon? We voted for the Canon, because it takes all photo sizes and comes with the software you need to transfer your photos to your computer, turn them into PDFs, etc. We were amazed that our friend’s “all-in-one” machine from HP had no such software.

Once you scan the photos, it’s the work of a minute to save them all to ClickFree’s “DVD Photo Backup” or Verbatim’s “PhotoSave DVD.” Stick one of these DVDs in your computer drive and the software onboard immediately sends out a search team to find and burn your photos to disc.

A pack of three PhotoSave DVDs holds 6,000 photos, and sells for around $16; a pack of three ClickFree disks costs $10. That’s not expensive but it’s even cheaper to use your own DVD. If you’re a Windows XP user, click “start,” “run” and “help and support.” Then type “burn” to get instructions. In Windows 7 or Vista, a window pops up automatically when you put in a blank disc, asking if you want to add something.

If you don’t have an iPhone, you can get promo codes sent to your email address or cell phone, at redbox.com.

Redbox offers$1 video rentals from kiosks, typically found in  U.S. grocery stores and pharmacies. The iPhone app works by giving you promotional codes that you enter into the machine to get  free movies or discounts.  You start off with one free movie, which  pays for the 99 cent app.

The Flip has 13 percent of the world market for video cameras and is far and away the No. 1-selling camcorder at giant online retailer Amazon.com. Why? Because it is the video equivalent of point-and-shoot.

The “flip” that gives the camera its name is a finger that flips out of the side of the camera. You plug the finger into a USB socket on your computer. Right away, a menu comes up with some easy choices: save to computer, e-mail the video, upload to sites such as YouTube, Amazon and MySpaceTV.com.

No more cable to carry around, no more rewinding a tape or “finalizing a disk.” You do need an extra cable if you want to watch your Flip videos on a TV, but it comes in the box. If you want your video burned to DVD, you can take it to a retail store that will do it for you (see theflip.com/dvd ) or use the software that came on your computer.

A button on the side turns it on. Push the big red button on the back to start recording video and sound. A screen above the button shows you what you’re recording. To play back what you recorded, hit the play button that’s next to the red button. That’s it.

Flip is the same size as a cell phone, only thicker and fits in a shirt pocket. It runs on two AA batteries.
There are limitations, which wouldn’t bother most users but would make it unacceptable for others. The main one is a recording limit of one hour. That seemed like plenty to us, but if you’re a video fanatic, you want more. You can’t stretch the one-hour limit because the memory is built into the camera and you can’t simply add a larger compact flash card. When your hour is full, or anytime before that, you can unload the memory contents to a computer and start over with another hour. The Flip is also not so good for zooming. You can zoom in 2X (two times closer) but the result is a little blurry.

The Flip works with Windows or Mac and you can see lots of reviews and comments on use with a simple web search on “Flip.” Joy said it’s the first time she’s had a video camera she actually wanted to use.

One hour of video stored on the computer can be burned to a DVD in just a half hour using this drive. If the source is streaming video – which means it is coming in live – the burn takes only five minutes longer than the actual time of the stream. If you were taking video at a party, for example, and had a computer and the drive nearby, you could pass out finished DVDs to the guests just five minutes after you finished shooting.

Other  methods of burning video to DVD often takes three times as long as doing it with the TruDirect drive. The key to this drive’s speed is that it skips using the computer’s hard drive and takes the digital feed directly to DVD. There is no pre-mastering, multiplexing or hard disk buffering being done by the computer; that’s all handled by the drive.

To set up the device, you plug the drive into a PC and install the software. It will recognize any camcorder, digital camera or webcam that is plugged into the computer. The DVD it creates will work with all players.

We found the TruDrive for $124 at a-power.com .

The drop makes a lot of sense since so many people have earlier versions of Roxio and those do most of what this one does. What’s been added is a three-step process that lets you automatically edit your video for posting to YouTube or to put it on a DVD. Also new in this version is a feature that lets you capture and edit high-definition video and add surround sound.

Easy Media Creator 10 is huge. More than 35 programs have been thrown together in an “everything but the kitchen sink” collection that lets you do just about anything in editing audio and video. Some of these programs are available in similar forms as part of Windows and Mac computers. But if you’re willing to spend some time learning the ins and outs, the Roxio grab bag can be a good deal. Tech support people tell us you get more consistent results if you use Roxio.

The Mac version of Creator 10 is called Popcorn 3, which lets you easily transfer video to portable devices, like the iPhone or iPod, Blackberry, and even the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3. This includes a feature called TiVo ToGo, which lets you pull anything saved on a TiVo box and transfer that to any of the aforementioned devices.

Creator 10 was easy to use for recording Internet radio stations and equally easy to use for converting video footage between formats. Enhancing photos taken with a cell phone — often low-quality — was simple and gave good results. We could make a 50-hour DVD of songs, and their titles and other information scrolled by the computer screen as we listened.

On the downside, a feature called Live Share did not work. This is supposed to let approved viewers riffle through a picture collection and download full-resolution copies. Our approved viewers got nothing but “page not found” messages, and working with Roxio tech support did not solve the problem. You can use a service from SharpCast.com, instead, to share full-resolution pictures free for 30 days.

Roxio.com has a comparison chart that shows which features in Creator 10 are available in earlier versions. If those are the features you want, you can buy earlier versions on eBay for $10 to $15.