Page 1 of Legitimate question on DVD backup`s

After seeing a previous question on CD backups, I looked into DVD backups, especially since my little boy has lost one of mine. It seemed to me that you could backup to VCD format, but the picture quality is not as good. That sounds like copying a CD to cassette (pointless). Can you do a straight copy, picture & sound quality wise?. I have a DVD-Rom and CD writer on my PC. Rest assured any info will not result in me selling copies at my local market.

Well you can buy a DVD burner for your PC - not sure how compatible, or how you actually would copy or even if you can, I suspect you could also cut a DVD into 600mb chunks and burn them onto seperate CDs without, I suspect, a loss in quality.

I believe real VCDs use a MPEG v3 where as DVD uses MPEG4 (although I might be wrong there)

You could also look at burning them as DivX:-) (or whatever it is) but I suspect you would only be able to play back on your computer.

This item was edited on Wednesday, 9th January 2002, 13:56

VideoCDs use MPEG1 which I believe is a fixed rate compression system with a low bitrate. DVD uses MPEG2 for video, which is variable rate compression and a much higher bitrate.

You can in theory directly copy a DVD, since it has no protection mechanism against a digital to digital duplication. However the snag comes with the fact that current DVDR media is only single layer and most DVD films use a dual layer format.

So you`d get about half the movie and then nothing, and no it won`t work if you just copy one layer to each side. :)

as 2 the question on quality,i played a vcd 2 my friend and asked dvd or vcd he replied dvd. with the new programs around quality is not a problem using them is, the ones down the local market or car boot sale are converted for speed not quality good luck

VCD quality can be quite good. I recently did a test backing up a DVD of mine. I would recommend TMPG Encoder to encode VCD`s as it is free, d/l here:

http://www.tmpgenc.com/e_main.html

Its quite straight forward as the download includes a settings file for VCD or SuperVCD (I think SVCD is MPEG 2 - Same as DVD - although this will not let you store as much on a CD as with VCD).

If you want to back up your DVD`s to play on your PC you can get DVD quality (almost) on a CD by using DivX as stated above. This is MPEG 4.

I don`t know how in depth you looked but this website has good guides:

http://www.digital-digest.com/dvd/articles/index.html

Edit:
or this one http://nickyguides.digital-digest.com

One point to note though it took over 4hrs to encode a (albeit long) DVD to DivX on a 1600+ Athlon XP. Hope that helped, good luck with it.

This item was edited on Thursday, 10th January 2002, 00:24

Lads are we forgetting the blocks on high motion scenes!

Good point, the film I used was Casino, not much going on there.

This item was edited on Thursday, 10th January 2002, 15:38

last vcd backup i did was u 571 and there was no blocking at all with the program set at high quality ( yes it takes 2 hrs longer but i let it do its thing at night ) i do not have any problem what i use is

1 smart ripper
2 dvd2avi
3 tmpeg
4 nero