DVD Catalyst is always under development, and while it has been a little while since the release notes have been updated, there have been a few minor-version updates, un-announced, since the last posted one.

DVD Catalyst 3 v3.83.5 is currently available on most of the normal locations, including the various sales-websites. You can obtain it by either using the original link you received upon purchase, or simply click on the cat-eyes to update.

What is new?

Since the last posted release notes, plenty of new device profiles have been added, including the newer Blackberry models, the Verizon Droid, HTC Pro2, Touch2, HD2, Leo, and the new Sony Aino and Satio phones. WHile many devices use similar profile settings, Sony (as usual) always does things different, and for their new models, a new screen resolution was added in DVD Catalyst 3, 640×360.

Besides the new profiles, a few things were added/changed as well.

With 3.83(.0) we added the CPU indicators. Small animated bars at the bottom right that shows you how busy your computer is. While it looks cool, it does take up a little power away from the actual conversion, so just to be able to squeeze a little more performance out of your computer, we added an option (Global Settings > Advanced) to turn them off.

In 3.83 some issues were reported in regards of 2-pass conversions. These have been adressed and fixed.

Some DVDs, such as The Dark Knight, caused some weird error messages in DVD Catalyst, and these have been adressed as well.

Recently, an issue with failed conversions was linked to having a non-standard character in your username. DVD Catalyst, by default, looks for the Video folder in your user profile on your computer. If you have a username such as “Nancy’s computer” the video folder would be something like “C:\Users\Nancy’s computer\Videos”

Because not all devices can handle all characters in a filename, DVD Catalyst uses a filter to rename the files to make them compatible. This caused the ‘ in the foldername to be renamed as well, resulting in a non-existing folder where the conversion would store the file, and thus the conversion crashes.

Lastly,

We still receive emails from people who experience virus messages from DVD Catalyst or even that DVD Catalyst is missing from their computer. While this has been fixed a few releases ago, not everyone who uses DVD Catalyst updates to every new version released (if it isn’t broke, dont fix it), people still run into these issues.

The reason why this is happening is because we used a program to “wrap” DVD Catalyst into a protection application. This application puts a layer around the program it protects, and gives it capabilities of making it expire after a certain time (trial version), and it also compresses the program, making it smaller to download. Unfortunately, for some reason, some virus scanners (Norton, McAffee) found that any program wrapped with this one particular application was infected. Even though the application was clean, it resembled a small portion of code of a virus, and rather than actually scanning the file completely, these virus scanners just mark it as being infected (thats how they get their speed)

While we tried communicating with various Antivirus companies, as well as the developers of this particular application, they all force us to install and purchase their products or updates before providing any assistance. With some they require the install of one of their trial versions, but due to the complexity of getting rid of it afterwards we offered a few different options instead, all which got ignored.

So, as a result, we are no longer using the “wrapper” application, and unfortunately, we had to modify the trial version into a conversion-limited (20% of each movie/video) rather than the 7-14 day limitation we have used for 5 years.

DVD Catalyst 3 always gets scanned upon release by www.virustotal.com, a website that scans files for virusses using 40 of the top antivirus applications.