DVDx What's the catch?

[asprinwizard]

Ok here's the deal. In the last year bands have stared to release their singles on DVD allowing you watch the video from your DVD player. I have quite a few of these now and wish to put them all on one VCD. However they all seem to have a level of copy protection which I cannot break. CLAD will rip them to the hard drive but DVD2AVI won't create a prject file from this which means that I cannot use TMPGEnc. Where as Flask will happily encode the Video but crashes when trying to encode the audio.

I therefore scanned VCD tools to see if I could find anything capable of breaking this copy protection. I tried SmartRipper first and it crashed my computer. But then I tried DVDx and found that not only would it encode at the same speed as TMPGEnc and faster than flask, but it did so straight from the disc. It didn't seem to care about copy protection. The net result is that I can now rip these DVDs without any probs. My question therefore is what is the catch?

Is the quality worse or something. From what I've seen it appears comparable with TMPGEnc and Flask. However the video I've been ripping was the Pet Shop Boys latest which is filmed on a home movie camera so it is hard to judge the quality. How you guys find the program?

The reason for the caution is that I will soon be heading out to the movie store to get some DVDs in to copy. So if there's something I should know about DVDx please tell me. Certainly the picture quality is much better than my ATI capture (shocker!!) and better even than my PV-256 which makes excellent (if non comliant VCD captures). But I'm not sure about comparison with Flask and TMPGEnc.

I would therefore welcome any opinions. Am I being unnecessarily pessimistic?

[AlanCake]

Hi

The catch is the quality isn't that good. You'll find you get a fair bit of 'pixelisation' on your output file ie square blobby bits, especially during a scene with lots of motion.

Seemingly, you can actually use TMPGEnc to do the coding bit whilst using DVDx. Though that appears to be a bit of a black art requiring the slaughter of a chicken and some virgin's blood.

Regards

Alan

[asprinwizard]

Anyone know how this is done?

[mh2360]

The quality you get with DVDx depends entirely on the settings you use. No, it's not as good as Tmpgenc, but if you take time to play around with the settings, basically setting everthing to "best", you can get some pretty decent results. The only downside to this is that DVDx can take A-G-E-S to rip a full movie (10 hours+ with a Duron 800 ).

[asprinwizard]

Thanks for the info. How does DVDx compare to TMPGEnc when used with the Panasonic plug in? In Speed as well as quality?

Also if anyone could show me how, or give me a link to using DVDx with TMPGEnc as the encoder as mentioned earlier in this topic I would be most grateful.

Cheers,
Asprinwizard