Not trying to sound like an ad here or something, but this is a very nice app. If you are looking for an all in one solution to backup your DVD's, try this sucker out. It is fast and the output looks great. It uses some really nice 3rd party apps and is basically a GUI that does it all for you in one swoop. It uses CCE or TMPGEnc to encode video, BeSweet for audio, BBMpeg for muxing, a nice 3:2 pulldown filter and some really good AVIsyinth scripting. It is amazingly fast. I was able to put 1hr 16 min on one CD and it looked incredible. It even does a batch mode for those nasty DVD's like the Sopranos so you can rip it once and then have it do each episode one after the other, while you sleep. It took some thime to figure out how, but it works great. It even lets you do chapters from the original movie. It's just a shame that I bougt a new DVD burner, I could have used this before. Now I have a new headache to overcome. It's stil great for 1 hour episodes though.

Yes we all know about DVD2SVCD,it is Quite widely used in VCD/SVCD circles, But the Quality of the Video Has absolutely Nothing to Do with DVD2SVCD but with the encoder and other program used to Create the movie, it is just a way to automate all of the Programs useing DVD2SVCD as a sort of a GUI..I personaly get Just as good or better Quality Doing everything Manually cuz you get much better controll over the perameters used to create the Movie..It is also a Good Idea to know how to use all of the Programs involved in creating a VCD/SVCD so if something goes wrong you know how to fix it...But Yes it is a very Good Tool...

I agree that it is best to know how to use all of the tools individually and I also know that the quality is very dependent on the great encoders that are used. But it takes all of the waiting between different parts of the process, instead of doing one process and then waiting and then doing another, it does them all back to back. You have to set all of your parameters prior and some of the stuff is simplified a bit, but that is the point. Sometimes doing it the hard way out of necessity is a good way to learn, but if they had this out a few years ago it would have made all of our lives simpler. Of course we wouldn't know as much now as we do today .

I remember doing 2 seperate encodes to MPEG4, one with high motion and one with low motion and then editing them together. Then they came out with NanDub which did two passes by itself. Then there was the calculating bitrate thing, then everyone and his brother came out with bitrate calcs. Its part of the progress. I know how to do all of this stuff manually, it is just nice to see an app that uses some of the best codes for the job and automate it. A lot of the "all on one" apps use some really shoddy stuff. There comes a point where my time is worth a little more than just being able to say that I did it all manually. Plus with all of the newbies that are coming along, this is a nice app to refer them to.

Think of it as when computers first came out, it was a very elitest group, and lets face it, they sucked. You had to do everything manually and it took a frickin degree to use one. Now everyone and his brother has them and it is a lot easier to get around a PC. Whether we like it or not, digital video is going the same route.

So yes, it is simplified, but that isn't always a bad thing.

Hi, sorry to bud in but this great program did come out "years ago" June 2001 to be exact and have been using it on and off since. And I too, will still do things manually on occasion but this program is still growing strong.