Video Converters, what's the best?

But but... blu-ray is already here Your 1TB drive would only hold 20 movies, if they do use all 50GB on a BD. It's gonna be some time until I get to blu-ray though.

harmann said:

But but... blu-ray is already here Your 1TB drive would only hold 20 movies, if they do use all 50GB on a BD. It's gonna be some time until I get to blu-ray though.

AAAH -- but the trick NOW is to use backup software to archive the ISO's -- the backup software will "Compress" (Losslessly -- I.e no data degradation etc) up to around 50 %. This will give you up 100 - 140 movies per 1TB drive -- whilst the ISO might be 50 GB in size the actual data content will be very much less.

When you want to play a movie just restore the ISO from your backup, "Virtual Mount it" and play.

OK a bit fiddly but IMO it's the best way of Archiving DVD's -- a 1TB disc these days in any case doesn't actually cost much more than a single Blu Ray DVD.

For Archive I use the Arconis program Backup software for data backup and disaster recovery in Windows and Linux - Acronis

so to repeat

proceed as follows A) Backup

1) Stage the DVD's to an "ISO" with Ultra ISO

2) Archive the ISO's with Acronis true image on to a different disk (can be external so you can play the movies when travelling on a laptop).

3) Delete the original .ISO archive

B) Recovery and playing

1) Restore the .ISO to local hard disk

2) Virtual mount the ISO (can be done with UltraISO)

3) use your DVD playing software to play the disk.

Works for Blu Ray as well -- creating the ISO is simply DATA for the computer -- so long as your device can read and handle BLU RAY then no problems. Not really sure however why anyone would actually want BLU RAY on a small laptop -- standard resolution is just fine on an 11 inch laptop -- I'm certainly got going to "Lug around" one of those Alienware beasts -- and I'm quite big and strong. Just imagine a small petite woman with one of those monsters.

Cheers

jimbo

Lossless compression helps but not much, or even any at all, when it comes to MPEG-2, H.264 or other lossy video formats because the video is already compressed, after discarding data.

Case in point: I have an anime ISO at 1.64GB. Acronis at max compression brings it down to 1.59GB. WinRAR at best brings it down to 1.57GB. 7zip LZMA ultra, 64MB dictionary size brings it down to 1.55GB. That's about 5.5% saved. Now if I use the above 7zip method on some mkv files (a container, like avi, in this case it has H.264 video and DTS audio inside) that I made from converting DVD, I get from 3% to 0% compression.

So if you want to drastically decrease the file size (because of small HDD, too many DVDs, for use on a mobile device, whatever), I think re-encoding is the only option. I see your points though. With 1TB drives going for 70 bucks, I may as well close my converting business

Anyway, back to the original topic... OP, how are you doing with your DVD? I think Avidemux works ok with win7... Haven't used it for a while though.

Hi all
I take your point about some formats are already compressed so Acronis won't necessarily buy you too much.

However why I started running the Acronis Backup to compress ISO's was that I have been using a DVD-RAM DVD recorder as well for a while -- whilst DVD-RAM might be getting long in the tooth it's still great for being able to record whilst watching (from the same DISC) at the same time -- so if you record say in LP (that's 4 hrs --approx 2 films in watchable quality - especially "Upscaled" on a 36 inch LCD TV) you can watch Film 1 whilst recording Film 2.

It's also good for "Partial edit" -- editing out the commercials etc. I like recording programs from things like "The Discovery channel" etc as well.

The ISO created is always 4.7GB irrespective of the amount of data on it - so using Acronis to "chop this down" was fine. OK you could hobble round with TS and VOB files but why bother -- as I pointed out Disk storage is getting so cheap it's almost reached "Throw away level".

Actually I think with current technology (1080p) the Jury is still out on whether BLU RAY is actually worth the extra cost on TV's 36 inch or smaller if you have a quality "Upscaling" DVD machine.

My computer has a BD RE device on it -- but I've never bothered using a BD disk for archiving -- I can get the nice little 320GB WD passport drives for almost the price of two BD-RE re-writable disc anyway (320 GB vs around 40GB).

As a photographer I understand a lot about "Up-rezzing" images (upscaling). We've done this for years . When DSLR's first came out 3 and 4MP sensor size was the norm. I'm not giving a maths lecture here but without a decent amount of "Upscaling" you wouldn't have even been able to print a decent A4 image -- to say nothing of A3+ and Poster sizes. -- The original Canon 1D professional DSLR only had 3 - 4 MP size but any PRO shooter at the time was able to make decent A4 Pics with this.

Algorithms these days are pretty good and unless you have a HUGE screen (and I don't like my living room to be dominated by a giant screen or look like a Hotel Lobby) I would defy anyone to really see any significant difference between a " True 1080p Upscaled" DVD and a Blu Ray one.

I'm not against technology but I don't think Blu Ray is worth it until the TV definition improves significantly.

Now Genuine 3D -- that's a topic for another thread.

Cheers
jimbo