Anything Better Than DVD2One?

[blazewon]

So I've been happily using DVD2One now for almost a year and as I was preparing to backup some movies for my next business trip I was just curious has there been any product to come out that is better?

I'm still doing the DVDBackup/DVD2One/Toast method.

I'm always looking to simplify the process. I travel often and it is so convenient to either rip Movies to my laptop or leave the originals at home. Also its good to have backups of my kids DVD's that they scratch and rip apart.

[galactica]

there have been some things but in my opinion nothing is "better"

Fast DVD Copy came out. Very rudimentary, simple and $99!!!!!!!!!
Likewise, a few new rippers are on the scene, most notabily Mac The Ripper and YadeX English version.

i use those now instead of DVDBackup

but as far as a killer replacement of dvd2one.... none in my opinion

[AntnyMD]

the only thing better, in my opinion, is buying the actual dvd, and buying a replacement copy for when "our kids" "scratch" "the original" DVD.

[galactica]

"our kids" "scratch" "the original" DVD.

i "love" when "this" happens... especially with "my kids"

[blazewon]

Hey at $10 -$15 a pop for these 30 minute DVD's having a backup is a must! My 2 year old absolutely destroyed a Sesame Street DVD no less than 1 day after we got it home! My 4 year old is a lot better but they still get nicked up pretty bad going from the house to the car to grandma's, etc.

[pixeljammedia]

They're just saying that "my kids scratch DVDs" has become the new "the dog ate my homework." Have kids scratched DVDs? of course. Have dogs eaten homework? Ruh-oh Rorge! There is some less than legal activity going on out there (shame on you ) but the simple matter of fair use should be enough. I'm just one messy SOB, and sometimes put a DVD silverside up on top of my player when I can't find the case on hand. I need to back stuff up to save myself from myself.

[blazewon]

Completely understood and its true that a lot of people make "backups" of rentals, friends discs, etc. but truth be told I really don't watch a lot of movies and my motivation was saving my collection from my kids. I have co-workers who go through 50 packs every couple of weeks burning "Backups" from rental stores and I just don't get the point. How can you watch that many movies and what are you going to do when Hi-Def becomes the standard and you have thousands of downsampled DVD's?

I think people are natural horders. If its something I REALLY like I will just spend the $10 - 15 bux and get it. But after my first child ripped apart a DVD or two I figured it was worth the investment to make backups. Believe me when you spend 2 months searching for a replacement of "Kids Favorite Songs 2" cause no one has it in stock and the original has a nice gooey stain on it that wont come off, the backup becomes a life saver.

[markusb]

My 2 year old absolutely destroyed a Sesame Street DVD no less than 1 day after we got it home!

I can beat that! My daughter broke "The Tigger Movie" taking it out of the case for the first time!

The disc split from the hole to the edge... good quality control there...

[thoughton]

Kids, schmids. My wife's idea of storing CDs is to have a wobbly pile of at least a hundred on top of the CD player. I don't even let her touch our original DVDs.

On the other hand it's pretty amusing the lengths we go to in order to keep up the elaborate charade of 'fair use' and 'backups'. Most of the people reading this forum are pirating movies, it's as simple as that. Unless some of you guys are buying 2 or 3 original DVDs a week... (yeah right). What I don't like is the sheer hypocrisy of the righteous condemnation people get when they (no doubt accidentally) let slip that they have downloaded a movie off the internet or are copying a rented DVD.

This thread will probably get locked now with some righteous comment :P

My 2c,

Tim Houghton

[AntnyMD]

You guys ought to make better choices when choosing husbands, wives and children! sheesh!

[terryj]

I'm just one messy SOB, and sometimes put a DVD silverside up on top of my player when I can't find the case on hand. I need to back stuff up to save myself from myself.

Nice to know I'm not the only one....


Of course, I freely have admitted that rather than letting
my brother, brother-in-law, or friends borrow my DVDs
( which pretty much almost destroyed my VHS collection
doing the same in the late 80's), I rip and backup copies
for them to borrow, and so far its worked to my advantage.

[WiseWeasel]

Back to the topic at hand, there's also DVDRemaster, which gives better results than DVD2OneX in some cases, especially using the downsizer option, which takes more time, but reencodes the mpeg2 video, yielding higher quality.

[twosocks]

I have both DVDRemaster & DVD2OneX. DVDRemaster seems faster but the quality, to me, seems about the same. I will admit, though, that I have not tried the Downsizer option. I was going to try it, once, to see if there was any quality difference but with my G4/450 it was going to take too many hours to re-encode. It's not worth the time to me. That's one reason why I stopped making SVCD's.

DVDRemaster, also, does not offer as many options as DVD2OneX.

When DVD2OneX has not worked for me, DVDRemaster would.

[Dunnyman]

I've never seen anything work as well as DVD2One, it just does everything it's supposed to, quickly, has good support, reasonably priced, and the join feature makes combining clips, etc of your own stuff a breeze. It's one of those products they got so right, that there's not much room to improve it.
Me, I'm a slob, I've wrecked more CD's, DVD's and VHS tapes over the years by just being lazy, so I've backed up quite a bit, plus, I take the copies on the road, in case something happens to it. At Christmas there was a guy flipping out because his DVD case got lost via the luggage compartment and he'd lost his entire collection other than the disc in his laptop. If I lost my road case, I'd be out about 40 bucks in blanks... Not 800.00 in movies!! (Besides, my precious collection of Japanese Godzilla originals leave the house? never!)

[thoughton]

I've gotta add that I tested DVDRemaster when it first appeared on a 8 gig DVD. I tried both requantizing and downsizer modes and, in my opinion, neither of them were as good as dvd2one. The downsized version was pretty good, but not any better (and in dark scenes a bit worse) than dvd2one. And downsizing was an overnight job. I also had strange glitches in the menus after downsizing (a few weird green lines in particular).

Never used it since

[galactica]

I agree.
DVDRemaster does its job, but not as good and as fast as DVD2ONE.
In my opinion, there has been no replacement for that app [yet]

[Dave Null]

What about 42-MP Plus ? It features a 9 to 5 DVD mode.

I've only tried the evaluation copy and, for what i've seen, it has far less options than DVD2One. Anyway, it does compact a film to fit on a DVD-R and that the only option i use with DVD2one.

For 15 euros vs 50 euros, it could be worth trying it. I wonder...

[carlmccall]

You guys ought to make better choices when choosing husbands, wives and children! sheesh!

Jeeze have I Been out of the Loop awhile: You get to Choose your Children Now ?!? Like, do you go to a Showroom and Pick, say, a Blond girl with Green eyes ?

On a Serious Note I've found what Works best For MY needs is MacTheRipper 1.5.6 and DVD2oneX Coupled With Toast Titanium 6. I save the UDF Data {DVD Format} as a Disk Image first so Burning can be automated from that Image. And, If you select that disk Image & Click the Mount button your DVD Player SHOULD Launch as if you put a DVD in the Drive.

[strpyw]

Just want to say this:
My dog did eat my homework one time.
Since then i always put away my important papers higher than the level of the dog's mouth.

[mhar4]

There's a program called Minx Transcoder which I use. Find it at http://www.hillmanminx.net/transcoder/

It is slow, taking a few hours to re-encode a movie, but it does work and the results are excellent, pretty much indistinguishable from the original. And it's free, which is always a bonus feature. Just make sure you check Pulldown if you are squeezing an NTSC disk, otherwise it will be out of sync.

What is Pulldown anyway?

I've been using it to "dezone" some region 1 disks I have because my DVD player suddenly de-chipped itself and rediscovered region encoding. What's that about?

[thoughton]

Nice tip mhar, I assume it is movie only? It's hard to tell from the 'manual'. Still looks pretty nice for donation-ware

[mhar4]

Yep, it's video only, no menus. However, it's easy enough to keep director's commentaries and add them as a second soundtrack with Sizzle.

[zapatasghost]

The only thing I've heard good about DVDremaster over DVD2oneX is that remaster is cheaper ($45 versus abt. $65 or DVD2oneX).

[pixeljammedia]

What is Pulldown anyway?

Pulldown is a way of making film which has 24 frames per second display on video which has 29.97 interlaced frames per second. What you'll see if you do not have pulldown set correctly is a film that goes way too fast because it is showing 5.97 frames more per second than it is supposed to. This is a gross over-simplification of pulldown which has to do with blending odd and even interlaced fields, but suffice it to say, you don't really need to go into depth. Just make sure that your 24 fps NTSC films are set for 24 fps.

[mhar4]

That makes perfect sense. The transcode of an NTSC disk I made without Pulldown checked was about 20 minutes shorter than the audio.

What about PAL, though?

Thanks

[pixeljammedia]

PAL has a frame rate of 25 fps. Basically the 24 fps film undergoes a similar interlaced frame blending as NTSC called Telecine, but this does not create frames like NTSC pulldown does. PAL simply plays every frame of the 24 fps at the 25 fps but slowly.

[thoughton]

While searching for information on 'line twitter', I recently came across a nice webpage with a VERY good explanation of 3-2 pull-down, 2-2 pull-down, telecine, interlacing, and a whole bunch of other stuff. Very clear explanations, with colourful pictures and animations for half-wits like myself!

http://www.hometheaterhifi.com/volume_7_4/dvd-benchmark-part-5-progressive-10-2000.html

(The page is actually about progressive scan dvd players, but the interesting info is all in the grey box about 1/4 of the way down the page).