There are a lot of ways a person can make a musical photo slideshow. My choice of bundling the photos into a media file with the music is primarily the result of the success of Microsoft and Real to encode the data into a file size I consider to be reasonable for today's users. I consider both Microsoft and Real versions to be equivalent in quality so the overall winner is Microsoft based on the smaller file size. I was kind of surprised to find out that Pinnacle Studio was the best way for me to create the file. I will not tell you how much I surfed the web trying to find a solution that Pinnacle already could do. I am running version 7 so I was surprised when I looked at the file and found that it had encoded with the Microsoft's version 9 encoder and Real version 8 encoder.