Demo Version Problems
This morning I wanted to check out the latest stuff from Nero- I’m looking for some good video transcoding solutions. The problem with this space is that with all the proliferation of codecs and container formats its often pretty hard to tell whether a given product will work for a specific scenario or not. I’ve got the AVS Media tools and they work for some things but not for others, but was hoping that Nero Recode could do the trick.
After a little poking around I see that Nero has a 15-day trial version. Great, I’ll check it out and if it works I’m happy to buy it. I apply for a trial key, download the 150mb installer and suffer through two reboots (one to remove an older version of some Nero stuff another to install the new stuff).
But then I find out that the feature of encoding into MPEG-4 is also removed from the trial. When I checked back on the trial download page, this information was there, but only if you opened a little “Additional Information” tab on the page- basically it was totally hidden.
Creating mechanisms for demo software can be a pain- most of them are somewhat annoying. For this kind of thing you can do 15-day trails, limited encoding length (only 60 seconds?), watermark the output, etc. But the key is that you need to give people a real taste of the software and this particular implementation sucks- the limitations we hidden on their web site so I wasted my time downloading and installing this useless demo, plus I can’t even verify that the functionality I’m interested in works at all.
Oh well…
posted in Business, Developers, Software, Technology | 2 Comments