Windows Live Essentials (for Windows 7 and Vista)

Pros

Pretty easy to import video content and fairly simple and straight forward to edit and slice and dice your videos.
It's freeware!

Cons

The YouTube upload feature didn't work for me. It just kept giving me tagging errors.
I hate that they force upon you the Bing toolbar.
They changed my upload icons so that I can't have a "preview" thumbnail.

Summary

I have only tried this on my Windows 7. I'm not sure if I want to test it on Vista or not. This is what I've been using to produce my YouTube videos and that's what I wanted if for. It has a button for YouTube uploading but I wasn't able to use it as I mentioned in the cons section. When I start splitting the video to remove a section it puts a lag and notchiness in the preview following which makes it hard to do any minute editing. I have to actually produce the video, watch it in media player then if it needs further editing I have to trial and error the rest of it.
As I mentioned before I hate having the Bing toolbar forced on me. It even put it on my Firefox on my portable apps drive and that totally sucks. I can't remove it, only disable it. As a lot of people know, browser toolbars suck bandwidth, open paths of communication that aren't necessary and are basically useless.
I also didn't like that video's I made with this program weren't able to be oped by Windows Live Movie Maker 1.0.
Other than that, it is a free app that does what I need and enables me to produce my YouTube content. However, as soon as I find and purchase a program that works for me this one is heading south permanently.

Reply to this review

Was this review helpful? -101   -101