It's harder than you might think to find an easy way to produce good-looking slideshows of photos - or videos - that incorporate the kind of snazzy effects, fades, wipes, pans, zooms, captions and credits that even amateur viewers have come to expect, and then burn the results onto a DVD that anyone can watch on their TV.

You can nearly do it for free with something like Picasa or Windows Movie Maker or even Microsoft's Photo Story, but somewhere along the way it'll let you down or you'll need another program to finish the job.

Xtreme PhotoStory is what our American friends call a soup-to-nuts product that lets you do the lot, and scores by making much of the behind-the-scenes stuff simple: so it detects whether you're likely to be using NTSC or PAL and lets you choose between 4:3 and 16:9 aspect ratios, and then automatically crops the pictures accordingly. It also offers a number of wizards to produce slideshows ready-styled with various themes and musical accompaniment, so all you have to do is select the content.

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Of course, you can put together shows manually and here the screen layout is pretty familiar; a preview window, another for content and then a timeline along the bottom onto which you can drag photos and video clips.

PhotoStory usefully monitors resolution and quality of your added media and will offer the option to omit content that doesn't make the grade. Any item on the timeline can be edited in place - for example rotated, captioned or have an effect/transition applied - and you can specify how long each one stays on the screen individually.

Some of the title effects are a bit cheesy, but there are no complaints about execution or the range available; as always, restraint is important so you don't end up overwhelming the content with a barrage of effects.

PhotoStory makes a good job of burning the resulting shows to CD or DVD and if the included templates lack a bit of imagination, they're easy to apply and offer some scope for editing. By the way, there's also a deluxe version (£49.99 inc. VAT) which can burn Blu-ray discs and comes with a larger selection of beefed-up menu templates, finer control over effects and the ability to have images change in time to the music.

Overall performance on our three year old Dell PC was pretty good, even with large numbers of photographs and hefty video clips, but whenever you return to Windows' main pictures folder, everything creaks to a near-standstill as the program re-scans the contents to see if it's changed. This happens every time and is an enormous pain.

Other wrinkles? The interface has only a nodding acquaintance with Windows conventions which makes it a bit of an adventure, there's the occasional untranslated German dialogue or message, running the program full screen disables the taskbar in Vista and some of the pre-packaged music sounds like it came from a 70s porn film (or so we've been told). For the money, however, this is a good choice for making a wide range of photo and video slideshows.

The generally well-executed wizards make this a sound choice for beginners who just want to make CD or DVD slideshows without really understanding how, while the ability to fiddle with most of the settings individually will attract those who prefer a more DIY approach.