I've downloaded, installed and run the software, I didn't install WMP10 (although it appears to ask for it), the proggie is compressing stuff as I speak. But the damn thing is awfully slow! I am running it on my office system right now, it's a Sempron 2500+ with 1.5 GB DDR400 (Kingston) and a GeForce 6600 GT and it's doing about 15 frames per second , maybe less. So I guess I won't watch "The Chronicles Of Riddick" in this new so-called "Wonder-format" today.
So far, the interface is OK but the proggie lacks all the gizmos I got used to while compressing with VirtualDub or Gordian Knot.
The lack of settings and the skeletal information flow from the software while compressing might be annoying for a lot of users. I don't see many people ready to wait 6 to 8 hours for the program to finish doing its stuff without getting any feedback.
...Maybe my Athlon64 3000+ from home will squeeze some time out of this long wait...

I unfortunately had to restart my system before the proggie finished its work. However, the partial file resulted was there, but I couldn't play it at all (it was interrupted at 81%, after no less than 7 hours of encoding). I used a file viewer to see the contents (Total Commander's Lister) and it has some archive header (saw the 'PK' string) and XML tags. Interesting...
I'll make the proggie compress the whole DVD again during the night and I hope I'll get some results tomorrow morning.

Hey WFP- nice to see you! I got it installed and I did encode a file last night at the default setting for quality. I was in a hurry this morning but I think it ended up 2.4 gigabyte file, but it has everything from the DVD. I need more time to fool with it as I had to go to bed while it encoded, so I don't know how long it took. Then due to heading for work I only had time to play a small bit of the resulting ratDVD file. But it did play fine, just a double click, so not bad for a first release - because if anybody can screw something up it's me.

I still need to compare it to the original and also try a burned disc in my player. May have time tonight I hope.

Edit: correction 1.64 gigabyte file. sorry

this thread is the first time i've heard of ratDVD and it seems very interesting. i'll be giving it a go in the near future.

I'll be testing it out on my video server tonight and I'll post my results tomorrow. I'm going to try it with something brutal like Gladiator. That should test it!

Okay, I've let the prog crunch the DVD all night, I can't tell for sure how long did it take to complete compressing the DVD but this morning it was done and I could play with the final result.
"Chronicles Of Riddick" dropped in size from 4470 MB to 1816,2 MB with about 10% drop in quality. I have chosen NOT to compress any audio and I've set the quality slider in ratDVD to 100. Oh, and for all the people out there which are concerned about having to use WMP10 I have great news! You don't need it to convert and play .ratDVD movies!
Nowm about the movie. ratDVD managed to keep the original structure intact, that includes all the features available on the original DVD. That is great! AC3 sounds were there, too, I managed to play the .ratDVD file just fine on my Genius 5.1 HT Audio System and it's surround, baby
The only drawback is the loss of image quality, but it's compared to compressing from DVD to DivX or XviD so that shouldn't be such a big issue. I'm not sure what will happen with the image quality after decompressing this movie to DVD format again, maybe I'll do that tonight and see what happens. Having both the original DVD and the (re)decompressed DVD at once might prove to be a good occasion to compare image quality and see if it's worth compressing our movies.
So far, this new movie format is promising, I simply love the idea of having the entire DVD in a single file (together with menus, extras, bonuses, etc.). But the developer should really-really try and optimize the compression algorythm, the compression takes too damn long to please...

I ended up doing a full back up of Oceans 12(first thing I grabbed, basically) and was equally impressed with the quality. Took about 5.5 hours to encode which isn't too bad. I kept everything except a few audio tracks and subtitles and it encoded it down to 1.1 gigs. I also want to decompress it to put it on a DVD+R and see how it looks. All in all I'm very impressed...especially for a first release. Definitely give this one a shot.

ahhh nice to see theres a thread started... I posted a few reactions to the news already. this looks *really* promising. It sailed through my matrix dvd which has nasty protected ifo's (shrink clone etc WILL NOT open this movie) and shrunk it from 8GB to 1.94GB at default qual setting. For all those who know the score and use XBOX media player to stream files from the PC's HDD to home cinema I think pretty soon the XBMC crew will be taking the filter .AX files and importing into XBMC but not sure if the cpu will be fast enough to decode the streams. That WOULD be the ideal playback solution (for me anyway)... gotta wait to go to work and see how the quality is after recoding back to DVD. Regards Nugget

OK all my encoding times are inline with all others here. Well I got the ratDVD file burned to DVD+R and it is very impressive to say the least. Used it on 2 different standalone players with no problem. A momitsu V880N and also a Pioneer 440. I can say that on my SD television that there is no way to tell the difference between this and the original. However on my HD setup in the basement I can tell there is artifacting when I look close at the plasma screen say from 4 feet away. But the sound is awesome and this ratDVD is so easy to use. If we consider how much this data has gone thru, to go from DVD ~8.4 gig to 1.6 back to 4.2 for SL archiving for a buck and looks and sounds this good, we have to be impressed.

I love this software I think it is great. What a job these guys did. I think that with this concept and BitTorrent, the MPAA has a real problem on their hands. I would suggest dropping region coding and delayed releases....soon.

I have also used ratDVD but in a diffrent way.
Used AnyDVD & DVD2One 1.52 to first resize the movie (movie only).
Then I used ratDVD and left the quality slider at default (95).
After 5 hours of crunching a file of 1.7 GB came out.
Then decompressed the file back from ratDVD format back to DVD format (.ifo/.bup/.vob files).
Compared the files with the first ones DVD2One made.
I could not see any diffrence in size or bitrate between the 2.
I don't know if this is a proper way to use ratDVD but I know one thing for sure, this will save people a lot of upload and quickpar time.
I'am much impressed with this piece of software.

Also have a question,

If I compress a movie with DVD2One and the same movie with ratDVD (slider set at 100) witch of these 2 programs will give the least artefacting ?

RatAttack !! Attack of the Rat !!
This proggie definitely looks promising. I hope the encoding times can be improved with future releases.

We don't know, how about you do a test comparison and report back to everyone?

RatAttack! HAHAHAHHA! I like it.

The Developers over at Peer Impact are already checking ratDVD out and may look at doing somthing similar.Or they could Just hire the developers like they did with Furthur.Net.

Impressive. Done the .ratDVD to DVD format with Chronicles Of Riddick and ended up with a perfectly playable file. I fed the file to Alcohol 120%'s Virtual Device and played perfectly. I only have a 21" CRT monitor but I couldn't see any difference between the original and the compressed, then decompressed movie. Thumbs up go to ratDVD for being the proggie of the year (so far, and promising to remain so)!

@ matt_the_rippa Hmmm.... Peer Impact? that's a legit P2P that sells legal. I am in the Beta what the hell do they want with ratDVD. I guess I should go over there and look, is there a post in the forums there or something?

Crabby they need somthing that compresses DVDs becuse their plan is to become the seller of everything digital in the near future.They are ready to release music videos very soon.

Im sure they could create a secure path in the Peer Impact client so you could only play and burn files from the client and they could enforce thier DRM that way .Looking at the forums they are also interested in the iteroperable Coral Consortium DRM .

All they need to do now is to convince the Studios that they need 0 day Movie/DVD releases and region encoding no longer works in a global market,Mark Cuban is already planing worldwide 0 day movie releases with his Entertainment company.

Peer Impact post (Bickster is a developer of PI)
http://forums.peerimpact.com/pi-foru...ead.php?t=1784

Thank you very much for the information.

Somebody mentioned that this program is not so good for data storing e.g. it will be used mainly for Internet transfers. Well, I don't aggree. Seems like compressing a DL DVD to 2 Gb or so savea an awful lot of space, and storing 2 compressed DL DVDs on a single-sided DVD could open the doors to a new era of data storing. If this brilliant piece of software becomes popular enough we'll prolly soon see standalone DVD players able to play .ratDVD files. This might be a boom in the market as well as the possibility for big companies to offer movie download services at a low price. Just compare this to the already flourishing market of online music stores. How about having access to online Movie stores that offer full-featured movies (surround sound, DVD quality, extras, alternate endings, bonuses, subtitles) and all that at an acceptable file size? I simply expect ratDVD to become as popular as DivX, XviD and Winamp. Tha developer of this program must be a genius, may the Force be with him

Hi ya'll :-)

Hurra, what a great piece of proggie !

However, a major feature is still missing here,
for my taste:

Biggest lack, is the ability to burn directly from ratDVD file
to a DVD empty media

What say you?

Linda

Tried to install ratdvd and it said it would only work correctly with xp,what about us with win2k.

I can say this much about ratdvd´s in XBMC for the moment:
Don´t count on it anytime soon.

Join #xbmc on efnet to talk to the guys in the team directly and they´ll back me up...

Other then that i find ratdvd nice after a few test runs. Looking forward to updates!

@MaterMind: It's not possible to burn the .ratDVD directly to DVD in DVD format because the .ratDVD format is compressed. It's like trying to burn DivX or XviD movies directly to DVD format. You'll need to convert the file to DVD format.

Thnx warforpeace !

I thought Rat is an IMAGE, like ISO.
Anyway, there are Players which can play Divx,
I guess it needs the right codec.
What proggie around can convert RAT to Divx/svcd/vcd?

It takes long to convert back RD to IFO, too...

MM

Well around this part of the World....

I compress "Dark City" with original 4Gis.. to 1.24Gigs in ratDVD....

Than, i transcode it back to DVD, with the same progam.....and i must say im very impress.....

All options, sound etc, avaible, and my Philips 737, had no problem read it!
The movie has very dark images, normaly, difucult to compress...but even so the image is very good!!

of course, at this time Dark City.rat is been share on Emule.....bigsmile:

Have a nice day everbody....