ratDVD not working with Windows 7

google "virtual-pc" to get to the microsoft page of virtual pc. If you have windows 7 ultimate or professional, you can download and install "windows xp mode" and
"virtual pc". After about 35 minutes of downloading and installing you can re-install ratdvd in xp mode. Done!

gkscorpio said:

.. In Windows 7 64-bit though, this player hungs with a "Media player classic has stopped working". I tried the above link for the Media Player Classic Home Cinema (64-bit), but when I load the ratDVD file I get a "Failed to query the needed interfaces for DVD playback" message..

I've got exactly the same probs trying to play a ratDVD-file with Media Player Classic Home Cinema 64-bit, v1.4.2499.0 (released on 07-Sep/2010), downloaded here Download Media Player Classic Home Cinema, Free Video Player Download yesterday. Quite a few month ago I've been searching for a nice player and found SPlayer seemed to be the most versatile open source player around playing ratDVD. I've downloaded the latest stable version 3.5 from the author's website SPlayer_Official Website_The award winning high performance all-in-one player.
This was not working that stable on my 64-bit Windows7 so I decided to uninstall it.
But today I've had a look at the author's website of this player again and found a link there to SPlayer 3.6 Build 1558 beta by 2010-10-12 at VideoHelp.com. This link routes to SPlayer 3.6 Build 1558 beta - VideoHelp.com Downloads where I choosed "download latest beta version here". You can use the link "download beta" instead, the downloaded files are the same (md5sum compared). This version seemes to work fine so far. The downloaded 7z zipped file extracted shows a folder namend splayer wich contains the splayer.exe. Just doubleclick this. It looks like this folder is ment for use as portable version (no installation is required).

Now with this version (SPlayer 3.6 Build 1558 beta) I can play my ratDVD files without any problems on windows 7 home premium 64-bit.

Hmm.. That's weird.. I tried with the exact same version, and I still can't read the ratDVD files. SPlayer application runs, but when I try to open a .ratdvd file I get immediately get thrown out to my desktop. Is there any other specific setting you changed? For the application maybe? I tried running as administrator, and with compatibility mode for XP but still doesn't work.

Of course I have Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit, don't know if this makes any difference..

Oh geesh...last time I heard about Ratdvd must have been almost 10 years ago
Are they still around?

gkscorpio said:

Hmmm.. I know about DVDShrink, I've been using it for a few years.. My only problem, is that I wanted a format with a filename that I could run with some media player instantly, without having to mount to a virtual drive.. Apart from that, DVDshrink produces PAL DVD resolution, in which case if you want to a lower-size backup file would be pixelized..

What I do, I have DVDShrink create ISOs which I have linked to VLC.
So a double click on any iso file starts VLC and plays that movie.

and no, sir DVDShrink orients itself on your source material. My rips are all NTSC



-DG

That solution with ISO files that are linked to VLC looks good. My only issue is that for my DVD backups that I keep on my hard drives, I would prefer a smaller filesize. And if I try to compress for example a 4,37GB DVD to a 2GB backup(or even smaller), ratDVD would give me a decent video quality. XviD would do to, BUT I would have to compress each video seperately, which for a music video DVD would result to 10 separate avi files. To make things smoother, AutoGK for example, would lower the resolution to something like 640-480. While ratDVD would create a single file with the menus and all..

If I tried something similar (a 4,37GB DVD to a 2GB backup) with DVD Shrink, even with Deep Analysis on, I believe the result would look a lot worse and much more pixelated, since it lowers the video size keeping the original DVD video resolution..

Yes, but my main concern is to maintain the DVD menus structure. If I just needed the main movie(or each video file on the DVD to a seperate video file) there many solutions.

mkv would also create a single file for each movie which I would have to run seperately.. (unless there's some way to have the DVD menus in a mkv container file that I haven't heard of)..