Is the EPIA-M 9000 fast enough for DVD to DVD copying?

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wumpus
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Post by wumpus » Mon Sep 08, 2003 8:29 am

Why not go with the M-10000 with the Nehemiah core? It's substantially faster, and at least in the same ballpark as, say, a P3-900 or Athlon 900.. whereas the older Ezra chips are more like p2-400s.

lenny
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Post by lenny » Mon Sep 08, 2003 10:36 am

tywen wrote:Do you think DVD to DVD copying is CPU intensive?????
DVD copying is, of course, illegal according to the DMCA. And of course none of us would dream of breaking the law.

Now, strictly as a theoretical discussion, to back up your DVD, you'd need to do one of several things:

1. Decrypt the DVD. You won't be able to copy the encryption keys to a recordable DVD. It's designed that way. So, in order to copy a commercial DVD, you need to decrypt it. This is not particularly CPU intensive.

2. Now that you have the decrypted VOB (video object) file, it's probably larger than the 4.3 GB that will fit into your recordable media. You'd need to either split it into two discs, or re-encode it at lower bitrate. Splitting is quite fast, re-encoding is very CPU intensive. You may also want to remove optional features such as some of the subtitles or audio tracks, or the director's comments.

3. Some DVD drives only allow you to rip (step 1 above) DVD Video at 2X.

So what this all means is that even with the fastest overclocked phase change cooled system out there, you probably don't want to do a direct DVD to DVD copy. But that's what hard disks are for. You rip to hard disk, re-encode, then burn.

Programs like DVD X Copy does it all for you. Last I heard the MPAA is suing 321Studios. You can also roll your own bundle. Check www.dvdrhelp.com for a continuation of this theoretical discussion :wink:

lenny
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Post by lenny » Mon Sep 08, 2003 11:38 am

If you're not planning to view your backed up video on DVD players, you can encode them to DiVX and burn them to CD-R. It's also very time consuming. I once experimented and it took a 1.5 GHz P4 about 3 hours to encode 1 hour of footage.

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