Hi,

Point #1 :
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I've been experimenting with InstantCopy 7 for a couple of days now. Let me describe my experience with it, and maybe someone else can confirm this behavior...

I've been trying to backup my kids DVD movies. I don't care much about the menus / extra features, so my plan is always to reduce the quality of everything but the main movie file to the minimum (30%), and then maximise the main movie's quality.

I've read that a lot of people have experienced that InstantCopy will produce a transcoded DVD that has a size UNDER the estimated size, meaning that if InstantCopy was saying you'd get a 4.32 GB disk, you end up (most of the time) with something like 3.9 GB.

So, I started to tinker with the main movie's quality, inching it up so that the estimated size would be larger than the allowed 4.32 GB.

My test movie was Tarzan, and here are my results so far (again, everything but the main movie is set at 30% quality) :

Try #1 : Initial setup : 71% quality (4.32 GB) -> final size : 3.91 GB
Try #2 : Initial setup : 74.8 % quality (> 4.32 GB) -> final size : 3.98 GB
Try #3 : Initial setup : 80% quality (> 4.32 GB) -> final size : Over 5 GB ????

That's right, for the 80% quality, I was expecting a size of maybe 4.1 GB, but instead it produced a final size WAY OVER what I expected of it...

Anyone else notice this ?


Point #2:
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Also : I read that removing titles from the DVD will invalidate the DVD's menu structure, which makes sense. I can understand that if a movie is set up to play the 2 or 3 "Do not copy" screens in sequence, and that the second one is missing, that will spell trouble.

But let's say I want to remove an extra feature, for example the Phil Collins video on the Tarzan DVD ?

1- What will happen if I try to select that extra feature with my remote ?
2- Is there an easy way to make the action for this menu item to be "Don't do anything" ?
3- Going even further, do you think it would be possible to make a simple screen that's saying "Feature not available", add it to the DVD, and make the menu item that was originally pointing to the removed title now point to that new screen ?


Enough for now

Thanks for any reply.