quicker dvd movie burning???

b4tn

b4tn

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I am a movie junkie! I have bought hundreds of DVD's and have them sorted filed and sorted by genre. The problem is that many of the movies are movies that my kids (5 and 9) want to watch also. Many times early on weekends or when I am away for work they have ruffled through my collection and I have had DVD's destroyed, scratched, and my file system destroyed by this. So I started using Mac the ripper and Toast to burn the movies my kids want. This way mine are safe and sound and they get o watch movies without dad harping on them. My problem is that that combo is soooo slow! Is there a faster way of doing it? A friend of mine suggested Anydvd and clone DVD for the PC even though I have boot camp I want to avoid windows as much as possible. Suggestions?
 
Fast DVD Copy. It's a tad expensive but perfect for this task. But basically, the task is the same: You have to rip the DVD to the harddrive, compact it if it doesn't fit on the DVD-R, then burn it. With a tool like Fast DVD Copy, you just can do it all-in-one, but it'll still take time.
 
Is it possible to copy directly from a DVD to a DVD (from, say an external enclosure?), or does they copy protection inhibit this? Seems like this would be faster, if it were possible.
 
For most DVDs, this would not be possible because a DVD-R or DVD+R can only hold 4.37 GB and commercial DVDs can hold just a little more - and often do for that reason. Fast DVD Copy is really the fastest tool I've seen for this process. You can - in one interface - select which parts you want copied, see how much place it'd take and whether compression is needed, then hit the big start button and watch it do its thing. (Or rather go do something else.) If you _do_ have two drives, it's still the fastest tool to do it imho.
 
Is there a particulaly fast tool for burning an AVI file to DVD? I'm using Toast and its taking an eternity. The last file I burned took nearly 24hrs to burn? I had to change the encoding (decrease the quality) to make it fit, but even so that seems a little tooo long?!

Any help would be greatly appreciated...

I'm using a 1.83Ghz iMac with 2Gb Ram and a SuperDrive.
 
I'm going to drop a plug for the Apple TV here. Rip the movies, auto sync to the ATV and lock the actual discs away. You have all your movies available all the time with no searching or fumbling. And while your kids may get PB&J on the ATV, your movies will still be safe.
 
Thank you for the response,

Wouldn't Apple TV only allow the movies to be streamed to one television in the house though? Where as burning a DVD would give me a much greater portability and allow the movies to be played in the car on long trips?

I know from previous experience of burning movies on Windows systems (this is my first Mac and I am loving just about everything about it), that it can be done much quicker than this. Am I being limited by the burn speed of the drive within the Mac or is this just a software issue?
 
The bottleneck is the conversion to MPEG2, not the burn speed. Even the slowest burners wouldn't take more than an hour.

Encoding video is going to be slow no matter what, but 24 hours does seem pretty extreme. You might find ffmpegX to be faster at converting the video. It can convert most movie formats to a VIDEO_TS folder, which can then be burned in Toast (as a UDF disc).
 
You are correct, the ATV is only hooked up to one TV. So while multiple computers can stream to it, only one computer can sync to the ATV.

I like the ripped movies also for trips as I can load them onto my iBook or external portable drive, or even burn multiple ripped movies to one DVD. Plus my iBook batteries last longer running movies off the hard drive versus the optical drive.

When I migrated from a 1.8 G5 to a 2.0 Core 2 Duo, my rip/encode times were slashed. 3 to 4 times faster. As Mikuro said, it's about conversion, not burning.

elgato has a USB device, turbo something or other, that claims HUGE reduction in encoding times. I believe it is a dedicated encoding processor on a thumb-drive type device.
 
I have downloaded the ffmpegx app, and have attempted to convert AVI files a couple of times now, each one completes within an hour or so, but i can not get it to generate the right type of .UDF file type.

Am I missing something totally blatantly obvious?! If anyone has any experience with the app could you please post a reply.
 
I don't know about .UDF files, but here's one way to do it:

In ffmpegX, select one of the "DVD" settings as the target format (in the Summary tab), such as "DVD ffmpeg". This will produce a folder containing VIDEO_TS and AUDIO_TS folders.

In Toast, drag that folder in to create a disc. So, the disc itself will contain those two folders I mentioned, VIDEO_TS and AUDIO_TS.

In the formats section on Toast, select "DVD-ROM (UDF)" and burn. That's all there is to it.

You can also burn with Disk Utility, but that requires an extra step. For more info, see http://www.ffmpegx.com/dvd_sub.html#burn . That page also has some images of Toast in case you don't know where the options are.
 
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