DVD To VHS

[baloney mahoney]

If I copy a DVD to a VHS would the quality on the VHS be less than the quality on the DVD?

[redwudz]

Yes. It would be the quality of VHS, which is about the same as a TV. But give it a try. VHS is analog while DVD is digital, so it's difficult to compare resolution by the numbers.

[Rich86]

If I copy a DVD to a VHS would the quality on the VHS be less than the quality on the DVD?

As already pointed out, the quality will be VHS level - about 240 lines of resolution, as I recall, compared to about 500 for dvd. Of course how apparent this is depends on the quality and resolution of your TV.

If we are talking about a commercially made movie dvd, it may also inflict Macrovision distortion on your vcr as a copy prevention attempt, depending on whether the particular title is encoded to turn on the Macrovision pollution chip in your dvd player, and how subject to Macrovision distortion your vcr is. If your vhs copy pulses light/dark/light with somewhat distorted colors, it is probably Macrovision distortion causing problems with your vcr.

[baloney mahoney]

I have this old movie that I copied from TV onto a DVD some time back and now I just wanted to see how good a DVD-to-VHS of this same movie would be if I copied it back again from the DVD to another VHS tape. OK, I dit it and the VHS quality that I copied from DVD back to VHS doesn't look as good as the quality on the DVD nor does it look as good as the original VHS I copied from TV. I would have thought that the two VHS copies would be the same but the one from TV is better than the one from the DVD which was a TV copy to begin with. Don't understand this one.

[redwudz]

Analog to digital conversions and back again is part of the problem. You can make a copy of a copy of a DVD and the loss between generations will be minimal. If you make a copy of a VHS tape, then a copy of that, it will be almost unwatchable. That's the main difference between analog (VHS) and digital (DVD) formats. Digital format is virtually lossless when duplicated.

[baloney mahoney]

Why would digital to digital suffer any loss? It's all binary and you'd think that a binary file copied to another media as a binary file would be exactly the same, just like when you copy a text file from one disk to another, it's the same binary and so the text is the same so why not binary data that makes up a video file be any different. I can see that when you copy a VHS tape to another VHS tape there will be some loss of resolution and then if you copy the copied tape to another tape the loss gets quite severe etc, etc, but I can't see that when copying one DVD to another since it's binary(or digital, if you perfer) and not analog unless the software can't do it correctly but a pure copy of one DVD to another, should be no loss at all.

[edDV]

If I copy a DVD to a VHS would the quality on the VHS be less than the quality on the DVD?

Assuming the DVD quality is at least good, .... Yes, quality will be worse in every way you can imagine.

An analogy might be "Would dumping my new Mustang into the Mississippi River get my car cleaner than the local car wash?"

[edDV]

Why would digital to digital suffer any loss? It's all binary and you'd think that a binary file copied to another media as a binary file would be exactly the same, just like when you copy a text file from one disk to another, it's the same binary and so the text is the same so why not binary data that makes up a video file be any different. ...

Depends if it is an exact data copy. There are countless ways to degrade quality in a digital "conversion".

...

but I can't see that when copying one DVD to another since it's binary(or digital, if you perfer) and not analog unless the software can't do it correctly but a pure copy of one DVD to another, should be no loss at all.

A copy is a copy. A conversion is not.

[baloney mahoney]

OK, I can see that it would/could make adifference if it's a conversion taking place. That would seem like a software problem.

OK, next question. Can I copy a DVD to a DVD-RW using the same DVD drive on my PC?

[redwudz]

Sure. You copy to your hard drive and use that file to burn to the DVD-RW. Of course the file has to be small enough to fit on the RW and your drive must be able to use RW media.

This is the usual way copies of DVDs are made. DVD Shrink uses the same method, along with decrypting and transcoding the DVD to fit. If you have two DVD drives, you can copy directly, but that method isn't always dependable.