Mercutio
Fatwah on Western Digital
Copying DVDs is most certainly at the top of the list of things most DVD burner owners want to do with their hardware, even if they won't admit it. It certainly was for me.
Sadly, most movies seem to have been specifically engineered to be a little bit larger than the 4.7GB disks that are presently available to DVD recorders.
In the weeks I've had my Sony DRU500A, I've tried a variety of different, methods for shrinking commercially-produced titles to 4.7GB. Most of these methods involve either stripping extras out, or splitting the disc in tow, and have been highly labor intensive (IfoEdit) or just bad at finding a cut off point (DVDxCopy). Others take a "encode the video at half the bit rate" approach and are of very poor quality (ReMPEG).
After a few weeks of playing with every tool I could find, I happened on a link to Pinnacle's InstantCopy program (link is to trialware version), I was fairly certain it would be just another crappy tool.
What the hell, though.
I downloaded it and gave it a shot.
My first title was "Simpsons Season 1, disc 1". 8.8GB. No extras to speak of, and with a "normal" split process, the split happens about 7 minutes into the fourth (of six) episodes on the disc.
I ran the disc's files through SmartRipper (no working straight from the DVD) through InstantCopy. I was able to strip unneeded subtitles and languages (ridding the disc of the evil influences of the Spanish!), and, amazingly, given the option of previewing and setting a resize level for each video stream. The transcoding was essentially real-time on the machine I was using, an XP1600+, requiring maybe two and a half hours to render to an image file.
The final product, burned to a DVD, looks good. Really good. Not quite perfect - there's a bit of the noise associated with MPEG compression that is visible at time, but I've seen the same thing from Digital Cable and small-dish satellite service (usually, much worse from either of the above).
I thought a cartoon might not be the best test, so I tried again, this time with "The Phantom Menace", a full DVD9 with every special feature known to man. Copy time remained about the same, 2.5 hours, and, amazingly, quality on Phantom Menace turned out better than the Simpsons. If there was MPEG blockiness, I couldn't see it, even while watching the entire movie (on a TV, not a computer monitor).
Just about the only complaint I have in all this is that InstantCopy sometimes doesn't completely fill a disc. I have no complaints about what it does, but for some reason, I imagine I'd get an even better end product if it was using 4.7GB instead of, say, 4.2.
Sadly, most movies seem to have been specifically engineered to be a little bit larger than the 4.7GB disks that are presently available to DVD recorders.
In the weeks I've had my Sony DRU500A, I've tried a variety of different, methods for shrinking commercially-produced titles to 4.7GB. Most of these methods involve either stripping extras out, or splitting the disc in tow, and have been highly labor intensive (IfoEdit) or just bad at finding a cut off point (DVDxCopy). Others take a "encode the video at half the bit rate" approach and are of very poor quality (ReMPEG).
After a few weeks of playing with every tool I could find, I happened on a link to Pinnacle's InstantCopy program (link is to trialware version), I was fairly certain it would be just another crappy tool.
What the hell, though.
I downloaded it and gave it a shot.
My first title was "Simpsons Season 1, disc 1". 8.8GB. No extras to speak of, and with a "normal" split process, the split happens about 7 minutes into the fourth (of six) episodes on the disc.
I ran the disc's files through SmartRipper (no working straight from the DVD) through InstantCopy. I was able to strip unneeded subtitles and languages (ridding the disc of the evil influences of the Spanish!), and, amazingly, given the option of previewing and setting a resize level for each video stream. The transcoding was essentially real-time on the machine I was using, an XP1600+, requiring maybe two and a half hours to render to an image file.
The final product, burned to a DVD, looks good. Really good. Not quite perfect - there's a bit of the noise associated with MPEG compression that is visible at time, but I've seen the same thing from Digital Cable and small-dish satellite service (usually, much worse from either of the above).
I thought a cartoon might not be the best test, so I tried again, this time with "The Phantom Menace", a full DVD9 with every special feature known to man. Copy time remained about the same, 2.5 hours, and, amazingly, quality on Phantom Menace turned out better than the Simpsons. If there was MPEG blockiness, I couldn't see it, even while watching the entire movie (on a TV, not a computer monitor).
Just about the only complaint I have in all this is that InstantCopy sometimes doesn't completely fill a disc. I have no complaints about what it does, but for some reason, I imagine I'd get an even better end product if it was using 4.7GB instead of, say, 4.2.
