GOOD NEWS! The freebie program, MyDVD, packed in with the Sony DRU-500 really does create half D1 DVDs.

Over a month ago I participated in a thread, http://www.vcdhelp.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=123411&highlight= that was discussing about why the MyDVD program that comes with the Sony DRU-500 makes files bigger than what you give it. The answer was based on the audio being transcoded from MPEG to LPCM. But, someone added that the video gets transcoded as well if you supply it with a half D1 file. I questioned the validity of that. Having made several DVDs starting with half D1 files, I never noticed MyDVD taking enough time to transcode the video. For a movie of about an hour, it will take perhaps 10 minutes to transcode the audio. But, it will only take less than a minute to process the video. I thought, "whoa, the video coder in MyDVD must be the best in the world if it can do this so quickly!" I was skeptical because the resultant bitrate on the disc was exactly as I had originally encoded it at.

Still, I was told that if I had cared to take the time to actually read the help guide that I'd see the truth. So I did. I saw mention of the files being 720x480, but the help didn't say that the vide MUST be 720x480. Nor did it say anywhere that it would be converted if it wasn't already 720x480.

To find out for myself, I put one of my DVDs authored with MyDVD into the computer DVD-ROM drive and fired up SmartRipper. Sure enough, SR reported the video as being 720x480. Hot dang, that MyDVD really is a super fast MPEG transcoder!!! Then I noticed that SR reports the video as being 720x480 no matter what you select. Even invalid choices get a specification of being 720x480. Then I tried IFOedit. It too reported everything as being 720x480. Finally, I looked at a VOB with ReMPEG2. This time, the output size had both 720x480 and 480x480 grayed out with only 352x480 being an option. Not only that, but it reported the input size as 352x480.

In spite of the two-to-one vote, I am still going to believe ReMPEG. Mostly because it actually looks at the VOB, where the other two may be getting their information from the IFO files. MyDVD may write those as being 720x480 files, but the real data is truly in half D1 if you feed MyDVD a half D1 file.