DVD2oneX2
Company: DVD2One
Price: 39.99 EURO
http://www.dvd2one.com
When DVD burners became popular in Macs, around four years ago or so, I was a happy camper. I couldn’t wait to make copies of my DVDs so that I could put the original away and watch the copies instead. This is especially appealing with the kid movies, as my kids tend to scratch up those DVDs pretty quickly. And at almost twenty dollars a pop, that can get expensive very quickly.
The problem I quickly learned, however, was that the common blank DVDs were single layered discs, while the movie DVDs are dual-layered. So I couldn’t fit a movie DVD onto a blank DVD. There was also no easy way back then to actually copy a movie DVD, a problem solved by the program “MacTheRipper.†Oh, and there’s the illegal aspect of it, in that you have to strip out the copy protection parts, which is a big no-no.
All that didn’t stop me from wanting to copy my own movie DVDs. The appeal to have copies of my movies, in case of accidents, was too strong. So while MacTheRipper would allow me to copy the contents of a movie DVD onto my hard drive, the resulting files were too large to copy to a consumer blank (4.7GB) DVD. Enter DVD2oneX2, an application that will “shrink” your movie files without much loss of quality, and allow you to fit that onto the single-layered blank DVDs readily available at almost every store.
For this review, I used the aforementioned MacTheRipper to copy movies to my hard drive. Once done, it was time to put DVD2oneX2 to the test.
Operation is a breeze. From the main window, you have three options:
• Make a full disc copy, including all menus and extras.
• Make a movie-only copy or join multiple movie titles.
• Re-master your audio collection onto a DVD.
For this review, and the reason I wanted to review DVD2OneX2 to begin with, I’m only using the first option; making a full disc copy with all the menus and extras.
Once MacTheRipper had done its job, copying the DVD to the hard drive, I launched DVD2oneX2 and clicked “Make a full disc copy” button. A window will pop up, asking you to select the source folder. The source folder will be the Video_TS folder found inside the folder MacTheRipper created from the original DVD. Point DVD2oneX2 at that folder, and select what the output type will be. DVD2oneX2 can burn directly to a blank DVD, but I usually make a Disc Image, which I save to the same MacTheRipper folder. This way, I can use DiscCopy to burn DVDs at a later date. If you have more than one DVD recorder, DVD2oneX2 gives you the option of which recorder will be used to burn a copy.
That’s the gist of the program, so now the important question: quality.
The movies created using DVD2OneX2 look almost identical to the original. In most cases, a casual viewer will never be able to tell they are watching a shrunk copy of a DVD, rather than the original. There were a few instances that I did notice a small difference, usually in very dark scenes where pixilation would occur. But those were rare, and easily lived with. We’re not talking about HD content here, after all.
In testing the software, I copied twenty DVDs using DVD2OneX2. All but one DVD worked flawlessly. For some reason, without naming names, one DVD simply would not. MacTheRipper did its job, it seemed, but DVD2OneX2 was not able to shrink it small enough to fit on a blank consumer DVD. It worked fine if I had MacTheRipper copy only the main feature on the DVD (the movie itself) but not the entire contents of the disc.
All in all, I’m very pleased with DVD2OneX2. I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to make copies of their own DVDs, along with MacTheRipper. Be aware that if you live in the US, doing so could be against the law.
Pros:
Easy to use
Makes almost flawless copies
Cons:
Needs outside application to RIP commercial DVDs
Requirements: Mac OS X (PowerPC and Intel) 10.3 and up. Tested on Mac OS X 10.4.8 PowerPC.
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