I have done several Picture Slide Shows on DVD's for members of my family on their birthdays.
I used Roxio Easy CD & DVD Creator Version 6. I used the DVD Builder there... and used Cd-R's to burn them onto. This makes the disc a VCD - and plays on all of my DVD players - Sony, Panasonic, etc...
I edit all the pics- put them whatever order I want- edit the music on the audio part of this program, which I can edit the songs their - splice different tunes together, and so on. You choose your menu image and menu song. It's a great easy program to use! And whoever you do it for- should love it!
i use proshow gold myself. been using it for about a year now, and it's simply a great program and quite easy to use. i've mainly used it to create dvd slideshows and then give them as small gifts to friends and family.
you mentioned transitions...proshow gold will certainly give you a huge selection as it has around 280 transition effects to choose from. your other req was music..and this is handled nicely by proshow as well. you can add multiple tracks to one show, customize start/end times for each track. it will also automatically sync audio timing to the length of your slideshow. but i usually do it all myself. you can also set times between transitions, the length of a transition on a particular slide, etc. plus pan and scan, zoom in/out, adding text/captions, etc. i'm sure other progs have the latter features, but at the time i didn't spend too much time looking at other programs in detail. i downloaded a trial of proshow, and liked it so much, that i just ended up going with that.
and you have several output options...you can create dvd, video cd, executable, iso image, and cue/bin image. the dvd is created, and burned, in proshow itself. so you don't have to use another program to burn the slideshow. the only time you'd have to go outside of proshow, in my experience, is if you are going to create an iso or cue/bin image. in which case Nero will handle both. as i understand it, roxio will only handle iso images...as it doesn't support writing of cue/bin images to cd. this info on roxio is per their website. so i don't know if that's still the case or if it's changed. i have had Nero, so haven't had to worry about roxio.
here's a link to the product site if interested. as i mentioned above, you can download a trial version and see if it's for you
