ratDVD is top story at News.com

And they're linking to us, which is nice ;-)

 

Fortunately AD is based out of Finland, which seems to be one of the last bastions of sanity in the world of copyright law.

 

MHopcroft: vurbal said it already. Our company is based in Finland, where copying music/movies/books for personal use is legal (whether you own the original or not), breaking copy protections of immaterial you own in order to make a copy for your personal use is legal, etc.

Stuff like distributing copyrighted material without copyright owner's permission is obviously illegal also in Finland, so uploading/sharing copyrighted stuff to P2P networks for example, is illegal. But downloading from P2P networks is legal.

 

It just goes to show you how perverse and warped the law is in regard to copyrighting, and what a quagmire it is currently wallowing in.

In other words:

*** It's against the law to upload/share copyrighted films.

On the other hand....

*** Once illegally uploaded, it is perfectly legal for you and me to download them.

So, one must first break the law in order that others may legally download *within* the framework of the law. (???)

(Hell man, I'm not even going to try to figure that one out!)

I'm happy to see that ratDVD has come to Win-2000 users now. As such, I have been tempted to try the software out.

But after going through the forums at cdfreaks as well as here, I discover more and more (and yet even more) problems with the software than you can throw a stick at.

This ratDVD encoding stuff is not for the faint of heart. Noobies need not apply. At first look, it seems like an awesome achievement! (An entire, fully-functional multi-menued DVD all scrunched-down into a single, transmittable, meta-tagged, picture-thumbnailed data file!)

In practice, things are beginning to look a lot less rosy.

** Crashes.
** WMP 9 and/or 10 not working properly, or not at all.
** Unacceptable pixellation/video quality.
** Extremely weak ability to de-interlace ntsc dvds properly.
** The not-often-mentioned necessity of installing 3 direct-show filter-replacements (ratdvd_filter.zip from developer's website) ....a) for AC-3 decoding; b) for Video decoding; c) for navigation within the file.
** Much more.

Opinions range all the way from euphoric to thoroughly disenchanted.

Just out of curiosity dRD, have you tried any rat conversions yet?

[Sigh.......] I *may* play with this thing later, but I think we need a few revisions first before this thing begins to take shape. Already the developer(s) are busily selling ratDVD merchadise (T-Shirts etc.) A bit premature, methinks. (Didn't DivX do this?) I don't exactly see DivX hardware everywhere I go, any how many years has it been?

T-Shirts and coffee mugs aren't going to make ratDVD a success.

-- Mike --

 

i tried it briefly, well for a few minutes. Incredibly slow to do anything after that few minutes. My machine should be more than quick enough but when i got stuff like DVD Shrink or Decrypter that take 15mins to get a movie to hard drive, until ratDVD can match that, for me personally there's no contest. Only time will tell, but what worries me is that it's surely coming at the wrong time, ie software that can potentially provide movies in virtually CD sizes, are no doubt gonna be stomped on by those greedy hollywood companies and the likes of FAST etc

 

Well, the overall processing time isn't a main concern for me, creaky.

I just got a new motherboard, 2.4 GHz cpu, 17" monitor and 200-gig hard drive 3 days ago. Nothing exceptional, no, but it ought to be plenty enough for ratDVD.

Maybe I'll try a *short* encode, but frankly, installing more ratCodecs (ratdvd_filter.zip) is not what I was hoping for.

 

i know where you're coming from.. but at least there's guys out there who will try it (such as yourself!) so ppl like me can sit back and watch the progress (or pain) other ppl have with new stuff

 

don't get me wrong, i'm certainly not gonna knock it. I personally don't like spending hours copying or converting my films. I love the 15mins it takes me with my current methods. Just my opinion, i'm gladly open to other opinions

 

You are right, arisia. (I am still learning....)

Yes, installing the ratDVD software automatically installs the three codecs, but you know?.......

Whether it's related or not I don't know, but ....

Immediately fter installing ratDVD, I "lost" a critical Win-2000 boot-file (I forget the file's name). Win-2K would no longer boot.

A complete re-install of Win-2k was necessary - no option. Took a full day to put all my software back, configure and tweak-up again.

Coincidence?

 

I appreciate the feedback, razmantis.

Well..... 2000 was working perfectly. I had no other programs running (natch) and I simply ran the .exe.

You need to reboot of course. It was during the reboot that ... (I couldn't) reboot!

(I found the error message) -

[bold]"Windows 2000 missing file: <windows 2000 root> \ system32 \ ntoskrnl.exe"[/bold], whatever that means.

It may not be related of course.

(No,no) I don't believe the good (russian) gentleman who provides the program is malicious in any way.

Maybe I'll wait for the ext version, though !

 

Thanks for the feedback, recca.

Indeed, my problem turned out to be a faulty (supposedly NEW) Hard Drive. It was loaded with bad sectors. No wonder ratDVD "failed". (Nero-Digital too).

Just put in a replacement 200-Gig Western Digital drive ($149). I'll see what happens.....

 

djbandit;

Like arisia says, ratDVD is (really) just in it's infancy yet. In time, perhaps not long, a dedicated, small, efficient, tweaked-for-ratDVD-files player will come about. In the meantime we have to make do with what (compatible) players we have.

Re: Hard Drives....

I'm very fortunate that I have three hard drives now. It's not a luxury anymore; it really has become a necessity. (Hard drives aren't very expensive nowadays thank god). My C:\ drive is strictly for Win-98SE ("ewwwwww!"); my D:\ drive is strictly for Win-2K and a few media files (why waste 80 gigs on just programs?); and the new 200-gig E:\ drive is *strictly* for media-file backups. (NO programs or OS's!)

If/when either of the two OS's buggerup/crash, at the very least I won't have lost my DVD rips. That can become expensive or at least very exasperating. Example: I waited almost SIX months for my local library to come up with Columbo's two boxed sets of tv shows. (Season 1 and Season 2). I had ripped them earlier, then returned the originals to the library so as to avoid late charges. But when Win-2k got fried, it "took out" the rips as well. (They were on the same HDD as Win-2k). I just lost 6 months of waiting and 2 boxed sets.

At least with the new 200-gigger, my rips will be safe even if everything else screws up. Box sets, when rented locally, cost $15 each. Expensive, to say the least when you're compiling, say, 24-years's-worth of Star Trek episodes. (Which I DID!)

The trick is (of course) to get the damn things burned to a DVD-R/+R as soon as possible.

Re ratDVD:

It's a novel idea! Unheard of (by me) up until now. But like Nero-Digital (a competing format), what, really, is the point?

You wind up with (hopefully) smoothly-working, good-looking movies which are much smaller in size than the originals. This is useful, of course, for folks with hi-speed connections who wish to share files on the internet.

But at home, for the most part, just as with DivX, you must generally use your computer for playback. Relatively very few stand-alone set-top players exist for any of these formats, and those that do tend to exhibit all sorts of problems.

And I expect that with Ahead-NERO's financial clout, you'll see a stand-alone NeroDigital player *long* before you'll see a ratDVD stand-alone player. (If ever).

It seems to me that both ratDVD as well as NeroDigital (.mp4) movies are going to be of far lesser importance as we enter into the new Blu-Ray world, with it's 25- or 50-gig-per-disc capacities. There'll be a whole new mindset when this format finally hits the market en masse.

For me, at least initially, I will be looking at Blu-Ray's ability to archive my HUGE collection of DVDs down to a far more reasonable size. What I have sure takes up a whack of shelf space. At first I won't be as much concerned with Hi-Defintion video as I will be in preserving my large collection on dvds onto the new media in it's present form. (mpeg-2 mostly, of course). I don't want to have to re-encode everything to ratDVD or NeroDigital or DivX or ..... Hopefully, the new set-top blu-ray players will handle mpeg-2 (dvd) video as well as the new Hi-Def stuff.

(And don't discount the importance of adding a new <cheap> HDD to your system!)