Day: January 13, 2005

Since I spend most of my working day on various video-related technologies, I receive a lot of questions from people I know about the best/cheapest way to back up their DVDs.

Fortunately, the easiest way I’ve found involves using two free tools, DVD Decrypter and DVD Shrink.

First, I use DVD Decrypter to rip the DVD to a hard drive (I have a 500gb external drive just for storing temporary video files). Each ripped DVD is going to occupy anywhere from 5-7 gb. DVD Decrypter is by far the easiest-to-use DVD ripper I’ve seen. It automates a lot of annoying functions that other DVD rippers require active intervention by the user.

Second, I use DVD Shrink to create an image file of the DVD that can be burnt to a plain old single layer DVD+/-R. DVD Shrink makes it easy to quickly eliminate or downgrade the quality of stuff I don’t care about — like “The Making of” documentaries or director’s commentary track to boost the video quality of the main program when taking a 7gb DVD and putting it onto a 4.4gb DVD+/-R. I can’t usually tell that much difference between the original and what DVD Shrink creates. DVD Shrink’s results are comparable to my digital cable signal, and that’s good enough for me.

I also typically burn the ripped DVD on my hard drive to a couple DVD+/-Rs. Dual layered discs are still $7 or $8 even if you buy in bulk, but if they ever come down in price, it wouldn’t hurt just to do a backup on a dual layer. Or, as hard drive prices are falling, you can just throw the ripped version on a hard drive and play that through your TV.

In fact, Lacie just announced a standalone external 80gb hard drive which can do just that — copy a ripped DVD to it, and play it from the drive to the TV. Now, if they can just come out with a reasonably priced 80tb drive that will do that . . .

On2 Technologies has a bizarre take on the world of video — it complains that companies spend too much time worrying about standards,

On2 CEO Douglas McIntyre says that his company is moving ahead of competing Windows Media and Real video codecs that are “growing long in the tooth,” and innovation was held up by such strict adherence to standards by both companies.

“The bottom line is that while our competitors make promises and debate in standards committees, On2 is delivering concrete results in marketable products,” said McIntyre.

Certainly the underlying basics are correct — if you wanted to start a company and create a codec that deliver the highest possible quality, probably the easiest way to get there would be to forget about any standards and create a completely proprietary codec tied to a specific technology/hardware platform.

What you lose, of course, is the ability for someone to take a video file in your proprietary codec and easily be played across a variety of hardware and software platforms.

On2’s major deployment appears to be in distributing video over XM Satellite, and in that particular case it may actually make sense to say “screw the standards” since they only have to worry about supporting XM. But if they want to go beyond such closed environments, ignoring and deriding standards committees and video standards is simply stupid.

Yes, it takes awhile from standard adoption to actual widespread availability, especially since a lot of video devices are embedded systems where you can’t necessarily just add the latest video codec at the drop of a hat. But its a worthwhile tradeoff to have that interoperability that standards provide.

Its a shame the article doesn’t say which codec he’s dissing precisely. H.264, which is finally seeing widespread adoption? Frankly, I’m extremely impressed in what I see from H.264 in a wide variety of video applications. I doubt On2’s codec can come close to matching the features of H.264.

Source:

On2: Standards Hurt Video Innovation. Ed Oswald and Nate Mook, Beta News, January 10, 2005.