First Impressions

I just finished backing up a 4.11GB down to 967MB and I must say the quality is pretty dam good on PC.
It was the the G3 Live in Concert DVD.
I liked the feature of all the menu's/chapters still present as if it was a DVD.
It took approx 2hrs on my machine to compress.

This is definately a plus for the filesharing community.

All that's missing now is a standalone DVD player compatible enough to play this format.

I will now convert the file back to DVD and report back with results.

 

Your saying a regular dvd player wont play a .ratdvd? If so thats sucks ass, not much point in using for alot of ppl then.

 

I have also just downloaded the program and compressed a DVD - very good quality playback. Took around 2 hours to compress the DVD by around 70%
I can see some applications for it such as file sharing and like the last writer would love to be able to put several compressed movies onto a DVD and play them in a stand alone. But - really impressed!

 

What would be good is a sort of patch that u could burn to ne disc cd-r/rw dvd-r/rw etc and put it on the dvd player so it can play rat dvd format then i could fit around 2-3 movies on a disk.

 

How do you expect a new format to be compatable with a hardware stand alone DVD player ?

I think the whole point is you could be downloading a full DVD with
all its content and it will only be 1gb in size and not over 4gb,
if you want to put it on DVD RatDVD will convert it back for you.

I welcome this new edition to the other formats it does a good job,
have yet to use it to convert from RatDVD > DVD so will look forward
to someone posting their results.


XIII2005

 

Ok I did some tests last night and some more are ongoing. This is an interesting program. Here's what I did. I pulled an episode of Space 1999 off one of the disks. The Ep was about 2.5 Gigs. I chose this show becasue one it's film and two it's quite Large for TV on DVD. I also took Disk 1 of the Show "The Job" and did that. And Right Now I'm doing movie only of Criterion's Disk of "The Rock"

Impressions.

Disk one of "The Job" took about 4 Hours. This was on my Centrino Laptop.
I kept the default 95%. The Result 1.2 Gb. All menu's intact. Now I can only view this on my Laptop, but my Dell 700m has a pretty nice screen. And I compared it to the original. One person said his result was soft. I don't see that. Occasionally you do see some Macroblocking but overall this is a very nice result.

The single Episode of 1999 reduced down from 2.5 Gb to 450mb at 95%.
Once again very close to the original except to the macroblocking. I would say it looks like a very well encoded High Bitrate Xvid, and probably comparable to Nero Digital's Cinema Template.

The Macroblocking may keep this from being usuable on my 96" Projector, but I'm hazarding a guess here that on my 30" Widescreen Samsung I'd be Hard Press to tell the difference. And Keep in mind this is the First release and you can do better than 95% if you'll accept hight file size.

The Negative aspect would definately be that for know you have to use WMP10. I'm hoping eventually more players will be compatible, I personally use Theatertek, but Hell I'd settle for Nero Showtime 2.

I can see this as very usable for someone that wants to encode either Single TV Eps or their entire Disks for a TV Server.

I'll report Back after I see what happens with "The Rock" and see how it looks via the Projector.....

 

@Scarpad

Works fine in Zoom Player


XIII2005

 

I don't own Zoom player is there a Free version of it?

 

@Scarpad

Yes the standard version is free !

Visit there site for more info on the different versions.


XIII2005

 

ok, just a followup on my first post.
I converted the ratDVD file back to DVD, strangely enough it took up to 3hrs to complete conversion.
The resultant file size was 2.68GB (original DVD size was 4.11GB).
Now the file size difference would largely be due to the fact that I chose the option for ratDVD to convert the original PCM & 5.1chan audio down to 192kbps 2chan AC3 in the first place.

-All menus/chapters were retained
-Audio remained at 192kbps 2chan ac3

The video did show macroblocking, but was not quite obvious until you look closely on the pc screen (I don't have a big screen tv so I don't know how obvious this would be).
It appears the video bitrate encoding is variable.

I would have preferred the encoding to make full use of the 4.3GB, by possibly increasing the bitrate on both the the video and audio.

Still this is early days and the software does have alot of potential.

I think I'll test it on a movie with alot of motion/action to see if the macroblocking is amplified. Then view it on a big screen tv.

I'm assuming the audio does not get re-encoded when converting from ratDVD back to DVD...anyone confirm?

 

Well that's my confusion here, I have'nt converted any back. But if the Program Compresses so that you can get smaller file sizes how can it restore what's No longer there, so how can it make an exact copy back

 

The DVD>ratDVD>DVD process does not provide an exact copy of the original movie, that's for sure. But the DVD menus work great, no issues here.

My tests:
LXG_SPECIAL_EDITION_DISC_1 (the first disc of the League of X Gentlemen, DVD Decrypted in 6.57 GB). Keep in mind that the resulting ratDVD file has all the original audio tracks, uncompressed, as this was my choice. Get rid of everything but the menus, subs and English 5.1 (converted to DD VS, actually), and the files should be about 1.30 GB smaller.

50 (lowest quality) >> 1.69 GB file, really bad quality, but watchable, even on a PC monitor;
95 (default quality) >> 2.22 GB file, lots of visible bad video;
150 (best quality) >> should be (*) 4.80 GB file, almost perfect .

My PC does a lot of crunching, so the ratDVD softare runs at it's default Low priority or ocasionally at BelowNormal. The DVD>ratDVD process takes about 2-3h on my P4@2.8 256MB machine, but ratDVD>DVD is somewhat slower, 3h+.

(*) I think there is some size-related bug in this version: running ratDVD at quality 150, i got a 5+ GB file that is not playable in either ratDVD, WMP or ZoomPlayer. So I did one more try, without the extra audio, and got a playable file, sized below 4 GB. Add in those extras and it should be a 4.80 one.

Now, if anyone would be kind enough to tell me how to capture the same frame from all versions, in WMP and PowerDVD, i'd share some screenshots.

 

the wierd thing with me is that I tried using ratDVD with Shark Tale and it crashed my pc twice, but Ill try it with another movie

 

Since RatDVD came out ive used it on 3 movies dvd > ratdvd > dvd and came out pretty good.

 

LOL Yeah Maybe!!!!!

 

Only just got around to using this and apart from the time it takes it seems like a great bit of software. I found it was a little faster when i ripped the dvd onto my hdd 1st b4 encoding.

 

I tried it with an Un-encrypted version of Anchorman I had on my HDD, and I experienced what Razvi did. I chose 150 quality and the 7.74 original got compressed to 5.5gb's, which neither WMP10 or Zoomplayer played. What a bummer after waiting 6+ hours to find out.

Anyone tried compressing video not from a dvd, I tried with a small slideshow I made for the family. Compressed nicely but I lost the audio from it. Could have something to do with the fact I used an mp3 before converting to .vob,or maybe a finger-fart.

Gonna have another go at it, alot of potential IMHO.

 

Can anyone confirm that ratDVD is actually MPEG-1 video and AC3 audio at half the original resolution and only upscaled on playback - and all that in a big, zipped file?