What is the benefit of Video conversion?

[apple2005]

Hi I am new to computer. I wonder what is the benefit of video conversion? Like I converted video from flv to DVD (.vob), but I didn't find any difference in video quality. The same quality in larger screen as flv. OR I am doing something wrong? The only benefit I think is to convert large video to smaller size for PDA.

I shall be thankful for your valuable feedback.

 

[mickey megabyte]

you can't add quality to a video file by converting to another format. a heavily compressed flv isn't going to look better as a dvd.

imagine having a really badly compressed mp3 music file, you can't improve it merely by burning it onto a cd.

you do things the other way around - you start with the good quality dvd at say 4.5 or 8 gigs, then you can rip it down to 2 gigs, or less if your eyes can stand the pain - lots of people seem happy to watch 700mb movies, but personally i can't handle the picture quality on my 24" monitor. of course, if the final playback medium is to be pda, you can take the filesize down even more.

hope this helps!

 

[apple2005]

^^ Thanks a lot for ur reply. One more question. What is ripping?

 

[thefabe]

ripping= burning

 

[apple2005]

ripping= burning

Thanks bro! But the other noble member mentioned that ripping to from 4giga to 2 giga. He probably meant conversion and then ripping (or burn as you said)???

 

[mickey megabyte]

ripping DOES NOT EQUAL burning

ripping means extracting data from a disc and saving it onto your hard drive, and then normally compressing it. this is what you do when you start with an audio cd or video dvd, and end up with a bunch of mp3s or an avi/mkv file on your computer.

burning is adding data to a blank disc. this is what happens when you start off with a bunch of mp3s (for example) and stick them on a blank audio cd so you can play them in your car...

 

[apple2005]

ripping DOES NOT EQUAL burning

ripping means extracting data from a disc and saving it onto your hard drive, and then normally compressing it. this is what you do when you start with an audio cd or video dvd, and end up with a bunch of mp3s or an avi/mkv file on your computer.

burning is adding data to a blank disc. this is what happens when you start off with a bunch of mp3s (for example) and stick them on a blank audio cd so you can play them in your car...

Thank you so much for the nice explanation. What I understood is that you compress e,g Dvd to some other smaller format on the hard disc is called ripping? Is that correct??

 

[mickey megabyte]

yes, although the compression is not strictly part of the ripping process, merely getting it off the disc and onto your harddrive is ripping - have a look here to learn more

 

[whs]

Sometimes you need to do video conversion because else you cannot proceed. I use a video editing program (Machete) that supports only a few filetypes. But .mp4, which is the output of my video camera, is not one of the supported filetypes. I therefore use Format factory ( Format Factory - Free media file format converter ) which is an excellent conversion program, to convert to .wmv.
I could, of course, edit my .mp4 files with Windows Movie Maker (WMM) after I installed the .mp4 codec. Unfortumately WMM transforms the files in a way that results in either much lower quality or much larger files. The program Machete that I use does not do that - it keeps my input as is (quality and size).

 

[Corpsecrank]

ripping= burning

Ripping means pulling the data from it's source. Ripping a CD means copying the songs from the disc to your PC as MP3 for example. If you burn the data your copying it from it's source to a clone which is different than ripping it's just copying or cloning. Ripping movies would mean your copying the DVD to your PC as AVI or as DVD format to be watched on the PC or burned back to disc at a later time which is where burning would come into play.

Just saying this for clarification purposes. Not just to say your wrong or be mean or anything.

About converting video? Well you should never convert video unless you have a good reason to do so. Every time you convert video you will lose some quality. There are so many factors involved in video conversion that are also dependent on the format that you can end up completely butchering the file by converting it. You should only convert video if you need to edit the video or need a specific format for a project or something of that nature. Also if you plan to convert video at all you should probably do some research and learn about different formats and what they actually do to the video. Compression methods are also important as well as what codecs are used and how they work. Video is not simple to work with by any means.

 

[masterB]

Ripping means copying a copy protected CD or DVD to the hard drive trough programs called CD ripper or DVD ripper. Ripping can involve encoding or not. If you rip a CD to mp3s encoding is involved.

 

[apple2005]

Thanks all for the nice explanations. Keep it up.