Well you've got to give credit for an innovative interface..
But after that, there are some rough edges. And that damn sheep crunching away makes me want to jump out of a high window onto some sharp railings. Couldn't we have had the actual movie in there - a la Shrink?

The first movie I tried was Disney's Sleeping Beauty. Disney DVDs are a pain, so a good thing to test with. This didn't let me down. It crashed within seconds - in any mode I chose to place it - with this wonderfully enlightening message:

PS 3 255 PS 7 2048 IDVOBU VOBU 3 2 VOBU 4 98941 154 TCE

Oh well, that's all right then. I understand now.

The next Disney - Lilo & Stitch - did manage to get through OK. Sadly, the retention of menus, which I thought would be this application's ace card, turns out to be a grey screen which plays through in whatever time the title you dropped would have taken. Couldn't the IFOs have been doctored so that dropped items were simply skipped? Like IC does?

The quality is OK: just the same as all the other transcoders. I wonder when people will come to realise that there is a finite limit to what can be done in terms of quality when all you're doing is compressing. You are just so dependent on the original encoder. And CloneDVD does not even offer the facility to set different compression levels for different titles - the trailers are going to get the same loving attention as the main movie...

CloneDVD then..? Good, but no cigar.

-Pete

Nice.

Well, guess Elby won't be getting my money for CloneDVD then...

a pity..hoped it would be something special
perhaps they should have been focusing in cd's instead of dvd's

i hope it gets better in the next releases, but it will be hard when there is free-ware that does the same

After having a little play around with it I have only two things to say.

1) I agree with you Peter, great GUI.

2) Too little and way too late.


JM2C

Why don't they support the CSS protection?

I remember there was a big hype that Germany has a new copyright law or something like this. And because of this Elby moved to Suisse...

Or was this only a marketing gag from Elby?

An

I tried CloneDVD on The Animatrix. I selected The 2nd option - "Clone DVD". I then only kept English audio and English subtitles.

I found the interface to be awesome. I believe it did a better job on this DVD than DVD2One. To be fair I have not tried the latest DVD2One 1.2.0 yet - its constant encoding could provide better quality.

As far as omitting titles, I believe it replaces them with a grey-screen of same length (but much smaller in size) and this is probably to preserve the original DVD layout otherwise chapter points and links could get screwed up if stuff was just omitted. I have never tried this yet, but I presume it is for people that still want a menu but don't care about some of the extras or trailers so they can omit them to allocate more space to the main movie. I think the problem that original poster is describing is they selected "Copy DVD Titles" with preserve menus checked, but didn't select any first-play/intro titles (copyright notice etc.) and got grey-screens when they first played the DVD. It may be better to start with "Clone DVD" option and just remove extras/trailers that one doesn't want. When preserving the menu it is important to keep the DVD structure the same and I think it is a good way, but not as good as DVDShrink's "still pictures" compression option, for preserving extras.

I'll try a couple more movies and maybe I will change my opinion if I get crashes or other failures, but I bet that they will resolve any such issues in upcoming versions.

Regarding the sheep - not a big deal. Since I use DVD2One I am used to looking at at % bar. It would be nice if they did replace it with frames from the movie though.