One thing that escapes me. It took an 8 GB DVD down to 3 GB rat container, but, the decompression back to its 8 GB target size from the pull down menu produced a VIDEO_TS folder of on 3 GB of VOB compliant files. I thought ratDVD was supposed to be able to reconstruct a DVD to its original contents, too. Did I miss something, or, is it only able to recreate a DVD-5/rewritable size disc? Which makes sense, in a way, since I think it doesn't claim to be lossless, right?

dbminter, it's not even close to lossless. I ratted a Seinfeld dvd using the default settings, resulting in a ratdvd which was about 1.5GB. Unratted to 4.7GB yielded a dvd of less than 4GB with a fairly poor picture. Unratting to supposedly double-layer size did better, though it wasn't full size and still was of noticably poorer quality than the original. An interesting idea, but there's still a lot of work to do, apparently.

Yeah, I ran a smaller test (800 MB test DVD image I have) on it and it restored it to 700 some odd MB. Plus, the actual EXE of the file is something ENCODE, so, it's an encoder. So, for those who want a small, easily distributed ;) DVD, or store their DVD's on large HD's, then, rat DVD is probably for them. I was wondering if it might be sort of a DVDRAR :) where a large DVD could be stored on a single DVD for later use. Certainly not playable, of course, just for storage purposes. Or to easily split a DVD across two discs for this purpose, without any encoding, just compression/splitting of the total files.

dvdrar...now that would be one hell of an idea ;-)

If you just want to catch DVD to one file on HDD with the same size - use DVD-image creation tools, such as Alcohol 120%: http://www.alcohol-software.com/ . It's not only lossless compression, but even playable from PC via DVDROM Emulation (also with the same program).

In most cases simple copying of DVDVideo to HDD (or decrypting with DVD-Decryptor) works fine and doesn't need any emulation...

And the main purpose of RatDVD is: to reduce size of DVD with better Audio/Video compression methods than MPEG2/AC3. But it also keeps all extra features of DVD, which are usually thrown away by other DVDRip software (such as DivX/XviD/etc...)

The closest solution to RatDVD I've seen is: "Nero Recode", which produces H.264 video + HE-AAC Audio + MP4 container (only if use new "Maximum Definition AVC" profile, appeared about 6 months ago). It also has great compression ratio with almost DVD-quality (better than DivX/XviD) and keeps in one file (MP4): video + many audio-streams + many subtitles + DVD-chapters. Nero Recode also creates DVDRip "by one-click" and video may be returned to DVD via "Nero Vision Express" (but the last is more complex than in RatDVD).

Differences between Nero Recode and RatDVD are:
1. Video/Audio/Container combination of Nero Recode will become a standart in the nearest future (called as MPEG4 AVC): it's already playable in UNIX (via libavcodec/Mplayer) and possibly in 1-2 years we will have hardware solutions for play its movies without reencoding.
2. Nero Recode is commercial solution and obviously not open-source! There is compatible open-source alternative to Nero Recode called "X264" + some additional tools (AAC-library/GUI/etc). Possibly Nero and X264 will have same positions in the future as current DivX/XviD.
3. Nero Recode can't keep more than 1 title in 1 file (extras only in separate files) and sure no menus/interactive addons/etc, which are kept nice with RatDVD.
4. Nero Recode compress DVDs VERY SLOW! About 5 times slower than RatDVD! X264 is little faster... but also 3 times slower compared to RatDVD. At the same time Nero Recode/X264 use 50-100 MB of memory while encoding, and RatDVD - 250-300 MB (which is possibly not very important)

So, RatDVD is not alone.. but obviously has unique features, very simple to use and very fast. And the most important question for now is: which video compression ratio is better with the same result quality? Any testing between Nero Recode, X264 and RatDVD would be nice...

My dream app is one that takes a DVD and splits it two DVD's. And, no, I don't mean DVD's that can be played in a DVD player. :) Just image the disc and split image files across 2 discs. Then, they can be copied/restored down to HD later for mounting as a virtual drive. The way I do it now is to have DVD Decrypter split at 1 GB chunks, then burn I00 through I03 to one DVD then I04 and the remaining I0x files to another DVD. Then, I can, in the most extreme case, use DVD Decrypter to create a new MDS file from the files off these two DVD's, one DVD each in a DVD drive. Or, decrypt the two discs, mount the disc images to virtual drives, create a new MDS from the files on the virtual drives, and mount the MDS as a third virtual drive. Or, just load the MDS into DVD Shrink if I want to do any editing. (And, for editing, the imaging to HD first is far faster than the slower reads from the DVD's.)