DVD-Burner ?

[Xtreme]

I saw a DVD-Burner today that i was wondering about. My question is this. How do you make a copy of your own DVD to a DVD-R or DVD-RW ? Do you just do a disk to disk copy ? Or copy to hard drive then to the DVD-R ? Now when you make these copies unlike VCD's will you get all the goodies that come with the normal DVD's from store ? Example: Deleted scenes, scene selection, etc ?
And my other question is this. When i take a mpg that i have downloaded from the internet, then put it in DVD format instead of NTFC will it look just as good as a DVD that i may buy ?

[Kdiddy]

No, a downloaded mpeg will not look as good as a DVD just cuz its on a DVD-R or DVD-ram...the media has not affect on quality...mpeg is a comprssed video form....so therefore if compression is done, it cannot look as good as uncompressed original...you best bet, if you were to get this burner, is to do a DVD-to-DVDr straight copy.....but make sure you standalone DVD player supports DVDror DVD-rams prior to purchase

[alkieman]

Whether the downloaded mpeg file looks good on a DVD-R depends entirely on the encoding parameters used. If it was an MPEG2 file encoded at full PAL or NTSC resolutions and bitrates then it will look great, probably comparable to commercial DVDs if the orginal source it was encoded from was great (say another DVD disc). If however, the mpeg file came from a VCD, was encoded from VHS, webcam, low quality AVI file or whatever then it will still look pants even on a DVD.

As for copying DVDs, depends again on the DVD you want to copy. If the disc you are copying is a single sided, single layer disc and is unencrypted then straightforward copying using your DVD burning software does indeed work perfectly. However, most commercial films are dual layer and encrypted. Dual layer discs consists of two thin layers bonded together, the first layer is slightly transparent so that the DVD player's laser can focus through it to see the second layer and continue the movie. This is why DVD players tend to pause slightly during a movie as the laser refocuses.

Single sided single layer discs store 4.7Gb but dual layer discs store double that so, as you can guess, you would need two discs to copy commercial DVDs. But then this leads to other problems. DVD Video discs contain IFO files which contain information needed to allow the DVD player to navigate around the disc. If you simply copied half the files to one disc and half to another then it would not play in home DVD players.

There is a way round it though. RIP the VOB files to hard disk (this generally also allows you to remove the encryption depending on the ripping program used, split them to video and audio files, reencode the video to lower bitrates and reauthor the DVD. Works a treat but is very time consuming.

Check out the DVD RIP guides here or at http://www.doom9.org for all you need to know about doing it.

Hope all that helps.