Obviously, if the main movie is like 4.8 or 4.9 GB, the compression by DVD2ONE will NOT result in a NOTICEABLE decrease in visual quailty. Let us start a thread where everyone can give their 2 cents about when (ie, what maximum file size) will the compression recude video quality to a level DETECTABLE TO THE THE HUMAN EYE. (yes,yes.. i know some of us have sharper eyes than others) What is the acceptable cutoff point per se?? So for instance...who here thinks it is better to just put an "x" sized movie on 2 blank dvds? a)x = 5 gb... compressing 5 gb to fit on one 4.36 dvd-r wont make a damn difference in quality b)x = 5.5 gb....compressing 5.5 gb to fit on one 4.36 dvd-r wont make a damn difference c)x = 6 gb...compressing 6 gb to fit on one 4.36 dvd-r wont make a damn difference etc. etc. let the joy commence.
I have ripped Gladiator and Scarface to single DVDs using DVD2ONE. I can't remember exactly how big Scarface was, but it was approximately 5.5 GB (Movie is 163 minutes) I am a believer in single disc solutions, but I also like big screen and have a Fujitsu High Res 42" plasma and I could not notice a difference with Scarface, to be honest. Scarface is old, but most of the movies I like aren't massive SFX stuff anyway. In order to do a good comparison I will back up Minority Report (just for research, you know) and post the results here ;-) Conclusion ? I think that a small reduction in quality is acceptable in order to avoid swapping DVD-Rs halfway through. This always annoyed me with VCDs and frankly, we have moved on enough for that to be a thing of the past. I also think that a lot of it is psychological, for example, performance car owners always drone on about the performance of their cars, but frankly have never used them to that level or with the pre requisite skill for it to make any difference. I think that some computer users fall into this category. I also think that as far as menus and extras are concerned, if it isn't in the cinema, It isn't on my disc! I wait for the emails to flood in from the purists! Paul.
My personal opinion is that if the main movie is over 6.5GB after I've stripped all god-knows-what audio files out of the VOBs, I simply give up and go with DVDXCopy and split the movie and preserve extras and stuff on the disc anyway.
Yes i agree tottally with your notion Paul. Compressing is a wise choice for films that are NOT heavy on visual pizzaz.
I have a Samsung HDTV and a JVC Progressive scan DVD. I play my DVD+Rs on this system and I can tell a change in the quality with diffrent DVDs On the other hand some of them look great. I just made a copy of minorty report and I could not tell them apart. But the director Bleached the film to make it look kind of grainy Or noisy. I think it all depends on the DVD. the TV and the DVD player. I also have 5.1 surround sound and it sounded great. MI2 on the other hand (some one else riped that for me) sounded like CRAP. Really Crapy.)
That'f funny you posted this today, because I was about to say the same thing: STOP PRESS : Minority Report is about 7GB worth of VOB After DVD2ONE I had 4.36 and I must say, the quality difference was minute. Every day I like this software more Paul.
I copied Star Wars Episode 2, quite a lengthy film. The file size pre DVD2One was about 7gb. The visual quality was excellent after burning.
Ummmmhmh?! The DVD2One doesn't do _anything_ to the audio, it is exactly identical audio to the original one. It only re-encodes the video if necessary.
Paul..did u watch the 4.36 gig version of minority report the whole way thru? I want to see if there was any differnece in the more intense scenes. Thanks
i have backed up numerous movies using DVD2ONE that clearly would never fit on 1 dvd, for example, Gladiator, Clear & present danger, the patriot (2:45), both harry potter movies, etc...no noticeable difference in quality on a 37 inch screen! in my opinion, DVD2ONE beats DVDX COPY hands down and it saves me $4 a disc! mike
off-topic, but... Ungh?! You've been shopping for wrong DVD-R brands, blanks cost even in the UK less than $1 each
i'm in santa monica, California and use dvd+r's. it has been my experience that if you use the more expensive dvd's you will have fewer problems and they'll last longer
I've myself decided to make double backups on semi-cheap DVD-Rs -- 2x Datasafe discs have been performing nicely (not even a single coaster out of 80 burned so far) and cost in the UK less than £1 (~$1.55) a pop.
Hi...just wanted to pick up on something mentioned earlier. I think DVD2One does do something to the audio since i backed-up The Right Stuff (a long film nearly 3 hours!) and I did notice a slight...just slightly...like say a few decibels! but nontheless degradation in audio quality. As for the video encoding it was bloody OK considering its 3 hours. Good Stuff!
I agree ! I first ripped The Green Mile to Harddisk. After ripping it was still 7Gb (the movie is 181min.) With DVD2one it shrunk to 4.36Gb. It's a miracle but the quality is still great ! Got a 181min movie copied onto 1 DVD+r !!!!!
I too tried experimenting with some long movies. I tried Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Rings and to tell you the truth, I could not see any difference. The VOB's were a total of 7.37g (2 hr 58 min). At the time I was using Version 1.0 of Dvd2one and got it down to the standard 4.36g. (Off topic) I did notice one thing that I had not see before. I use Nero 5.5.10.17b w/mpeg2dvd plugin and normally it take about 40-45 minutes to burn the DVD-RW (1x). When I burned LoTR, it took over an hour. Might have been the compression as DVD2one had to compress the orignal VOBs to about 50% of the original. (End off topic) But as I said, I personally did not see any difference in the quality of the video. I am very impressed and happy with DVD2one. Freeop...
Late answer to question : Yes I did watch Minority Report and the action scenes were fine. Unlike MPEG compression, which can cause blocky scenes if the bitrate is low, this software uses something else, which does not seem to pixelate the output much. I have only noticed a little grainyness (if that is a word!) on 3 hour movies. Paul.
I've had no problem with movies in the 7 gig range using dvd2one, and yes if you look real hard you might just detect some loss in picture quality, but the difference is mostly irrelevant. The seven gigs once stripped of extraneous content such as foreign language audio and subtitles, along with advertisements and so on shrink considerably before the file is compressed. So there is less compression than one might think.
Just did Star Wars II Attack of the Clones, although lots of SFX (well actually, I don't think there is a scence without some form of SFX!) and watched it on a 28" widescreen. Worked like a charm, I really couldn't tell witht this one. Paul.
I know, I've been doing two or three a day after work with almost no effort and without a single failure. The best system I've found is a combination of DVD Decrypter, DVD2one, and CopyToDVD for burning because it integrates with DVD2one as though they were a single application. I know some use Nero but Nero is still a little quirky with burning DVD's. HLG