I'm new to DVD buring and would like if someone could take the time to explain a couple of things. One, the diference between Dvd5 and Dvd9. Two, which of the two burning engines vso or nero should I use when copying dvd movies. Thank you. P.

I will try to help you on this one. DVD-5's are single layer dvds. This means they hold 4.7gb of information. A DVD9 is a dual layer disc which holds 8.5gb of information.

For example if u go buy a new movie on DVD, that movie is a DVD9. That is how the movie companies get all the extras and such on there.

When it comes to burning these DVDs. If you are using DVD5's to burn, there will have to be some compression to fit the original DVD9 to a single DVD5. This can be done several ways, using DVDFab, DVDShrink, or IMGburn.

If you plan to use DVD9s, (more expensive, but not unreasonable - AND use Verbatim DVD+R DL), there is no compression required and it makes perfect quality backups of the original DVD9. If doing this use either DVDFab's Clone Feature, or IMGburn, as both have worked great for me.

Dvd5 is a regular 4.7 gb disc. Dvd9 is for duel layer. Dvd9 is a 8.5gb disc. The Dvd9 will do an entire disc without any compression, where the Dvd5 compresses the video to fit it if the file is larger than the disc.
I use the vso burning engine. I'm new to this, but I'm learning fast.
If you're burning a disc to a 4.7gb disc, DVDPLATINUM has a box that you can change from Dvd5 to Dvd9. When mine first loads, it's automatically set to Dvd5. After inserting a movie, it'll show the compression ratio next to the disc size. 100% means that it's on a Dvd5 disc, and you can burn to it with no compression. Anything less than 100% means that the original is on a Dvd9. Also make sure that you're not writing in packet mode, as this will cause the dvd you're trying to burn to not work in some players.I've got mine to burn at 4x speed, and it's working great. Tried burning at faster speeds, but ended up with some new frisbees. Takes longer, but saving money on having to buy discs.

Right on, thanks for the info. Now I understand the difference. I'm currently burning custom, dvd9 to dvd9 dL, vso, at 4x and sao writing. Hope it works. In the future my normal burns will be of the dvd5 compressed type. Thanks again and Aloha from Hawaii. P.

Only the paid Gold/Plat versions of DVDFab will compress.

Dvd Shrink is a good free program that compresses and converts to a ISO Image File.

ImgBurn does not compress, but if you are doing a DL burn you can use it's "Build" feature to convert the Dvd Hard Disk Folder to a ISO Image File.

at what % does the compression become noticable on an average sized TV( say 27-37 inch screens), or on a widescreen PC monitor ?

I guess if if the movie almost fits onto DVD5 i.e. the percentage that fab quotes is in the 90s then it should look almost identical, wheras if it's 50-60% there's going to be some visual degredation.

Are there any threads where this has been discussed/analysed & where folks have reported on viewing tests ?

I'd like to know as there seems to have been a big price hike in Verbatim DL blanks recently - they are now about 5 tiems the price of Verbatim ingle layer and approaching the price where it's almost as cheap to buy a spare used version of the original DVD ! ( best UK prices are now over £2 per DL blank for boxes of 10 or 20, with postage, yet the ones I bought a couple of month ago were about half of that!).

This has been discussed at great length and repeatedly in the forum. The quality of the output video for a given Quality percentage number depends to a great extent on the video bitrate of the original DVD and the way it was encoded. The final judgement is subjective. I have done some titles as low as 65% that looked great, others at 80% looked fuzzy. You must be the judge based on your personal preferences. DVDFab does an excellent job, easily the equal of the Adaptive Error Compensation in DVDShrink and much faster. In my opinion.