detail information

The first thing we're going to check is how long each software needs to compress our test DVD titles. As we said during the introduction, we've split up the article into two sections: movie only and complete DVD. Below you can see the results of both tests in two separate tables. Keep in mind that the times below do not include the time it took for burning the ripped files:

Compression Time:

From the table you can see that the different software packages are very close to each other when it comes to compression time and thus it's hard to identify a clear winner. DVD2one was often the fastest software, closely followed and sometimes beaten by CloneDVD. DVD Shrink was a little slower but not much.

One software package that stands out in our results is Pinnacle's InstantCopy software. While most other software packages needed less than 30 minutes at most to compress our tests DVDs, InstantCopy needed around or even more than two hours. When we contacted Pinnacle to ask them some questions about their InstantCopy software they send us part of an interview with some interesting questions and answers:

Q: Your InstantCopy product is slower than competing products like DVD2one or DVDShrink?

A: Well, basically MPEG Video is encoded in groups of pictures called GOPs. In every GOP is a reference frame followed by several difference frames. While the reference frame is encoded as a full picture the difference frames contain only the differences to the 'last" frame. While encoding every frame is 'quantitized" - this means that small, almost unnoticeable differences in the signal are removed. Both InstantCopy and competing programs change the quantization process. However, InstantCopy is the only program that takes the changes done into account for the following frames. This means that additionally to the 'quantization" the whole frames needs to be decoded two times and encoded one time which is indeed very time consuming. However, if you only do the quantization the picture quality gets worse with every frame until the next reference frame is decoded - which is the famous annoying 'pumping".

While the above explanation sounds interesting, it doesn't really explain why InstantCopy is so much slower than the competition. The real difference in compression time is because InstantCopy uses a directshow filter for compression while the other software packages use direct stream processing. Later on in this article we'll of course see if this makes a difference when comparing the produced video quality of the competing software packages.

File Size:

When it came to achieving the maximum output file size we again had the best results with DVD2one, closely followed by DVDXCopy XPRESS (which can only copy the main movie from a DVD). CloneDVD also performed well here but DVD Shrink and InstantCopy were sometimes a bit off target. We'll see if the lower output file sizes have an effect on produced video quality later on in this article.

Introduction

CloneDVD