Hello,

This is my 4th piece of software I'm investing with the potential to buy. I understand there is a ton of info in the forums but if I pay $49 for a product I'm not interesting in spending days piecing and sorting to get my presales questions answered.

Plus I've went that route and wasted money on 2 other pieces of software so this go round, I'm asking the questions up front to test support, promptness of answers. Correctness of answers and then to see if answers get me where I want to be.

With that said if anybody reading this has a list of short concise threads docs etc that answer my questions, linking them here will be fine as well. I'm just not going to spend hours researching and doing rip after rip to experiment.

FYI I downloaded the trial for 4.0.5.0 last night and that's what I'm testing with below.

Questions
1) Last night I ripped a movie using To Xbox. It is a DTS movie and that's what I selected for audio. It took 4 hours to rip on a core 2 duo 6600 on Vista with 3gb or ram. Machine is a dell Dimensions 9200 about 8 months old. Is 4 hours with this software expected?

2) Even though I selected DTS for the audio, when I play it back it's in stereo, not DTS. Why did the program not encode the audio to DTS?

3) Pix wasn't that great at all. The highest resolution was selected. I know there is some loss always but compared to what I got with the same movie using Fair Use 2.6, this didn't come close. I only did a 1 pass as that took 4 hours, I was afraid to see how long 2 pass would take. Is there any settings I need to tweak when ripping a movie using the xbox template?

3) My main goal is to rip my DVD's to files that I can play on my 360. I have media centers and a machine running Tversity I connect to. I can rip to Avi divx or xvid) I'd prefer to rip everything to WMV's so I can play on my Zune etc. WIth that bit of info, what settings are recommended to give me the best possible sound and picture quality that I can stream to an XBOX?

4) I just kicked of a Generic burn and it appears it's going to take 40minutes versus 4 hours. So question is why is doing burn to WMV taking so much long than to to AVI?


That's about it. I plan to take the answers I get from this thread and follow each one and then compare the end results with a couple other products I'm asking the same questions about and then once and for all try to purchase a product that will last more than a couple of months before I have to look for something else.

Thanks for your time in advance.

Regards, Greg

Greg,

Thanks for the response. I can host on a media center machine to make sure Tversity isn't doing anything but the proc on that server is 99% idle when hosting so I'm pretty sure it's not doing anything. Actually I remoted in and turned transcoding off so I know that won't be an issue. I'll still do it from a Vista box as well to be sure.

Your recommendations you mention using DD 5.1. Are you saying that Fab won't do DTS? That's one of the things I was excited about.

Thanks for the reply, I'll redo a rip when I get home with what you suggested and evaluate.

Thanks!

DVD Fab will copy across the audio track that you select. I always select DD5.1 as I play my files on a wide variety of clients and a lot of them do not support DTS but all will play DD5.1

I am not sure what the XBox does. You would get more info on that on the XBox and TVersity forums.

Doesn't look like Xbox supports it. I ripped like you mentioned and file won't play on the xbox. So it's either DTS or Xvid. Redoing it to DD.

One thing though I installed this dvdfab and it prompted me to install a device driver. Think it installed pccoufin or something.

What's wierd, can't play movies in media center. Ones played in media player, sound is gone. And now can't even play dvd on this particular machine. Don't see how DVDFab could have done that but it's either that or Xvid I installed on this machine.

Post more later.

Thanks.

the pcouffin driver is the burning engine included with dvdfab.
http://www.vso-software.fr/

if you prefer to use imgburn, nero or something else you dont need the pcouffin driver.

Thanks for the input. Actually I don't plan on burning any dvd's anyway, just want backups to files.

I was just trying to recollect what I installed yesterday that has caused the flakiness with Media Player. It appears it's a combination of Divx and Xvid installations. I removed those and downloaded AC3 Filter to play digital and dTS and fixed the sound problem and video problem for the most part.

Something still has the Media Center and WMP screwed when trying to directly play the DVD.

For future reference, DD 5.1 as well as the other recommended settings seem to work fairly well. Takes about 44 minutes for each pass on my Core 2 Duo 6600. I did the 2 pass and the video is pretty good. The vertical of the pix seems a little stretched at 720 x 400 but good enough and sound is encoded good.

Looks like it's going to come down to this, anyDVD with CloneDVDMobile or Fair Use 2.6 with fair use having a slight advantage because of price.

Thanks for all the replies.