Elby CloneDVD released! [Archive]

debug77

18th June 2003, 19:07

Originally posted by JonRead
I wonder if it does copy protected DVDs and how fast it is ? Guess I will download a demo of it.

According to the help file, nope, it doesnt remove protection:

NOTE: CloneDVD does not backup copy-protected DVDs! Many DVDs are Content Scrambling System (CSS) encoded, which is a copy-protection file system. If a DVD is CSS-encoded then the DVD reader will refuse to access the disc. Therefore CloneDVD cannot read the files and make a copy.

Cant for the life of me figure out where you specify the transcoding options though... Says I need 6gb free for the DVD I'm trying to do (only have 4gb at the moment). I'm hoping from that it's not just going to spew out a 6GB ISO file (you can specify DVD files in a folder, or write to DVD if you prefer) :confused:

debug77

18th June 2003, 19:30

Hmm. Seems like you don't get a choice? I've free'd up some space now and started it off doing Rat Race (Region 1, 7.2gb in total to begin with). It's estimating that it'll take 41 minutes to complete the entire disk (movie+extras) on my Athlon 1800XP / 1GB RAM. Will find out afterwards what the quality's like.

I'm fed up of the sheep eating popcorn already anyway :p

Update: Movie quality seemed "ok", and it does seem to have spread the transcoding evenly amongst the disc. Fair bit of noticable artifacting though. However, it did manage to get it to the elusive 4.36GB size which is always nice ;)

SillyWabbit

18th June 2003, 20:29

Just finished backing up Almost Famous. Here are a few quick impressions of the program. This is not meant to be a review of the program but I thought I would share my thoughts after one use.
It's very easy to use. I especially like the fact that the program will create an iso image after it's done transcoding (Would be nice if DVD Shrink had that feature). The one thing I don't like is that the program plays for a fraction of a second the part that's been ripped out then displays a grey screen for the remaining time. I prefer just deleting the vob files that extras are included in and then use menuedit to remove the menu option.
The quailty of the movie seems pretty good. I haven't burned it yet on DVD; just played it on my computer. I still prefer DVDShrink for now. Let me know your thoughts

JonRead

18th June 2003, 20:32

edit: seems this is, in fact, Elby's direct link for download (http://213.242.80.4/download/SetupCloneDVD.exe)

Also to be noted there is a FREE 30 day trial, and I believe you get the full copy of a DVD too, rather then just a few mins, within the trial limit.

Interface pic for anyone who is interested (can't seem to add a pic within the post, so click the link instead).

http://www.storedspace.com/clonedvd.jpg

DMagic1

18th June 2003, 20:45

Hmm....

I get an error when I do a full disk right when it starts. No error doing movie only.

Error creation DVD files
Creation of DVD files was not successful:
VobSet 0 62912 TCE

JonRead

18th June 2003, 20:47

I will let you know what happens when I have backed up my full DVD. Currently doing Red Dwarf Series 1, which is 7gb. Doing full DVD copy to a ISO image output. Says 28 mins for complete DVD, will be cool if so (and if with good quality of course).

Anyway, will let you know results in a few mins.

P.S : Debug77, I know what you mean, Dolly the sheep eating the popcorn is pissing me off too and this is my first DVD backup, haha.

debug77

18th June 2003, 20:56

Further to my post before... I've just gone back to try it with DVD Shrink to see what the quality's like, and I can't even get it down under 4.36gb without setting the extras and menus all to Level 10 and the movie to Level 8! That said, I think CloneDVD did a darn good job quality wise! :eek:

royal

18th June 2003, 20:58

I ripped a movie with CloneDVD and I'm pretty disappointed with the results. So I decided to try the same movie with the other dvd programs to see if they could transcode it any better. I used the latest version of DVD2one and DVDshrink and did a side-by-side comparison (screenshots) and CloneDVD's results look to be bottom of the barrel. I'm gonna try IC next and see how that turns out, I'll post the screenshots after if anyone is interested.

Also whenever I tried to fast-forward or rewind the movie I did with CloneDVD, WinDVD would just crap out on me as soon as I let go of the fast-forward/rewind key.

JonRead

18th June 2003, 20:59

EDIT : Wrote the below message before seeing Royals above post about quality. So I guess it makes my query redundant if it is different to DVD2One.

Do you think CloneDVD uses its own transcoding engine or borrowed someone elses ? Just that is says around 30 mins per DVD, exactly like DVD2One. I guess they must have smart enough programmers though to do there own.

royal

18th June 2003, 21:17

I thought it may have used the same transcoding engine as DVD2one, but after the comparison, it clearly doesn't.

I've uploaded a screenshot

http://www.geocities.com/royalloyar/dvdcompare.zip

DMagic1

18th June 2003, 21:20

Well it must have a problem with 007 The World is Not Enough. I did a different movie and it started creating DVD files fine. I'll post some feedback when its done.

mrbass

18th June 2003, 21:24

I'll test it out just for the heck of it. Anyway here's a mirror for the comparison royal did. I'll keep it up for a few days.
http://www.mrbass.org/royal-dvdcompare.zip [883KB]

0xdeadbeef

18th June 2003, 21:28

DVDClone (ElBy) has its own transcoding engine. Quality is about on par with IC 7.x, bit better than DVDShrink and definitely better than DVD2One (which just switches Bitrates from full to low).
Just tried transcoding Brazil. Image Quality is a better than with DVDShrink 2.3, even though I kept Menus. Pretty fast, too.
Only thing that bothers me is that I thought I removed the copright warnings and they're still there. Hmm...
Big plus comapred with DVDShrink 2.3 is that Menus can be kept though extras are ripped. This worked in some older version of DVDShrink but seemed to cause problems.

Anyway: this is the first Version of CloneDVD and yet it has already become my favorite one-click copier. Fast, very good quality, all the options I need.

DMagic1

18th June 2003, 21:34

Just wondering where you got that info about it being on par with IC. Is that an opinion or are there some fact to support that.

JonRead

18th June 2003, 21:38

My verdict.....

My PC : Athlon 1800XP with 1gb DDR RAM 7200rpm HDD
Transcoding Speed : 28 minutes for 7gb DVD down to 4.36gb
Size Output : Perfect, exactly a DVD-R size
ISO Write Speed : 10 Minutes
Quality Result : Looked much better on TV then PC screen, but I was quite impressed, I personally would rate it around the same as DV2One (newer versions). I thought the quality was great and had no problems with it.

DMagic1

18th June 2003, 21:54

My input on my finished movie(Blade). The movie quality was good most of the time but I did see some bad spots. I dont like the way it handles removed extras. Like the other member said, it shows like one quick frame of the extra then a gray screen. It doesnt even kick you back to the menu. It keeps playing that gray screen for what appears to be the length of the orginal extra. It also compresses menus with no way to tell it not to. These things plus the fact that I couldnt do my 007 movie with it in full disk mode make me really have to pass on CloneDVD.

valnar

18th June 2003, 22:10

A comparison with IC7 and DVD95Copy would also be nice, as those are the only two I use.

I would do it myself but won't be near my desktop PC until tomorrow. :scared:

Robert

0xdeadbeef

18th June 2003, 22:58

As already said in another thread, German magazine c't had a very in depth review of several one-click DVD copy solutions in their 11/2003 issue. For analysis they used a tool called JNDmetrix-IQ by Sarnoff which uses a "Human Vision System Model" to measure visual quality. They also made a bitrate analysis.

In this test, the CloneDVD beta version had quite similar JND and bitrate results compared to IC (7.01.119).
DVD2One (1.1.3) had much worse JND values and a bitrate quickly jumping between minimum and maximum bitrate. "9to5 DVD Ripper" uses the same engine as DVD2One so no difference there.
DVD95Copy and DVDXCopy Xpress use the same engine. Both tools created JND values and bitrates slowly jumping between original quality/bitrate and very bad quality/bitrate.

About the greyed out extras in CloneDVD: this is what people want as feature in DVDShrink. It's better than DVDShrink's "still picture mode" if you want to keep the menu structure but erase extras. Of course it would be better if you could really erase stuff like with IfoEdit. But it's better than nothing.
The only thing I'm really missing after some testing is the ability to select a different bitrates for main movie and extras or whatever. But I'm quite sure that'll be implemented in the near future.

DMagic1

18th June 2003, 23:07

Ok, I remember that article now. My problem with the grey extra is that the grey screen keeps playing. It doesnt kick back to the menu after a second or two. I think thats what everyone is wanting in Shrink and it would be better if Clone did that.

BTW, that article was based on Clones movie only results not full disk I do believe.

0xdeadbeef

18th June 2003, 23:30

Indeed, the beta had no full movie mode yet, still the single movie result were very good.I think there's no reason to assume, full movie mode would have sucked.
You could however argue that according to the c't newsticker of today, the release version has a completely reworked transcoding engine. Thus the results were only preliminary. Then again, I doubt the transcoding engine became worse since the beta version.
I also made some screenshot comparison between DVDShrink and CloneDVD and CloneDVD looks a bit better IMHO, surely not worse than DVDShrink.

About the greyed out titles: as far as I understood the author of DVDShrink, this would be the only way to do it without reworking the DVD structure. That's why he implemented the still movie mode since this seemed to be not as silly as watching a grey screen for minutes/hours/whatever.
Surely it would be possible to shorten or completely remove these titles, but than several internal pointer/indizes in the DVD's menu structure would have to be changed. This seems to be a lot of work and probably it's rather dangerous ground, too (concerning introduction of bugs and so on).

DMagic1

18th June 2003, 23:45

I see.

SillyWabbit

19th June 2003, 07:22

Just did a full disk backup of the second disk of Arliss with CloneDVD with English Ch 6 audio. Boy did that copy suck. The menus and intro look like sh!t. I did the first disk with DVDShrink at 40% compression and it came out much better. I don't know why I keep trying other programs. For me DVDShrink is the only way to go backing up DVDs. Just my .02.

wumpi

19th June 2003, 09:27

Originally posted by 0xdeadbeef
As already said in another thread, German magazine c't had a very in depth review of several one-click DVD copy solutions in their 11/2003 issue. For analysis they used a tool called JNDmetrix-IQ by Sarnoff which uses a "Human Vision System Model" to measure visual quality. They also made a bitrate analysis.

In this test, the CloneDVD beta version had quite similar JND and bitrate results compared to IC (7.01.119).Yes, but notice the following. At Heise (http://www.heise.de/newsticker/data/vza-18.06.03-002/) (Ct's news ticker) they announce the public release of CloneDVD. Normally they never add screenshots on Heise - in the case of CloneDVD they do.

Also note that according to Heise, who seems to have a lot of insight into CloneDVD, the transcoding engine of CloneDVD was completely redone since they tested the beta. So the test you read is irrelevant. And statements like "Hauptsache die Qualität stimmt" are simply not objective and don't say how the product compares to its competitors.

Make sure to read the user comments as I am not the only one who is upset about ct's cheap market advertisement.

catss

19th June 2003, 10:23

I did a Backup using CloneDVD, kept the main movie + the menu . The handling is very easy and it is the first of the one-click programs that alows to strip stuff out. But now the bad news, I endet up with 4,07 GB :(. Besides that a great program maybe they are able to fix this in future releases.

0xdeadbeef

19th June 2003, 11:15

@wumpi:
I also commented on the reworked transcoding engine three posts above yours. So please don't quote me and tell me things I wrote a day ago.

About "advertisment" for CloneDVD: this is nonsense and you know it is. ElBy's CloneDVD is a program lots of people were eagerly waiting for. After the very good results of the beta version, it's obvious c't would comment on the final release.

If you quote, learn to quote correctly:
"dennoch zeigte auch ein kurzer Test mit dem Release Candidate (1.0.2.1) sehr gute Videoqualität"
->
"however, a short test of the release candidate (1.0.2.1) showed VERY GOOD QUALITY".

As you would expect from c't, they didn't dare to finally judge the release version before some more in depth testing. They will for sure publish more accurate results in on of the next issues. So what is your problem?

@catss:
I tried "Brazil" several times with different settings and always ended up at 4.36GB which is pretty much perfect. However, estimating the final size seems to be a bit of a problem - at least with certain DVDs. Even IC7 sometimes comes out below 4GB.

wumpi

19th June 2003, 12:25

Originally posted by 0xdeadbeef
@wumpi:
I also commented on the reworked transcoding engine three posts above yours. So please don't quote me and tell me things I wrote a day ago.I was referring to the Heise post and not to your post.

About "advertisment" for CloneDVD: this is nonsense and you know it is. ElBy's CloneDVD is a program lots of people were eagerly waiting for. After the very good results of the beta version, it's obvious c't would comment on the final release.No, but it is nonesense that you assume to know what I "know". Go back to the heise article and see how many people also believe my "nonsense".

If you quote, learn to quote correctly:
"dennoch zeigte auch ein kurzer Test mit dem Release Candidate (1.0.2.1) sehr gute Videoqualität"
->
"however, a short test of the release candidate (1.0.2.1) showed VERY GOOD QUALITY".Do I sense hostility from your side? What is your problem?
Only because the author says in a 4 paragraph short article that the product showed "VERY GOOD QUALITY" (quoting you), does that mean, he made an objective point?
Besides, don't tell me how to quote, you simply quoted another part of the article.

As you would expect from c't, they didn't dare to finally judge the release version before some more in depth testing. They will for sure publish more accurate results in on of the next issues. So what is your problem?My problem is that people like you become hostile as soon as someone says something contrary to their point.
Fact is that you are mixing up the purpose of C't and heise - heise has always been used as a newsticker. Subjective statements like "VERY GOOD QUALITY" (again quoting you) without any reference to any test results are out of place here. You talk about accurate results - I don't see anything accurate in the heise article.

0xdeadbeef

19th June 2003, 14:12

@wumpi:
Hm? Don't want to start an argument here. It should be obvious to anyone that 80% of the stuff posted on the heise forum is complete rubbish posted by bored male students. That's why I never registered there. So why should I care about the heise forum trolls in this case? Besides, some guys whacked on the trolls, too.

And yes, you referred to one of my posting but overlooked the one in which I commented about the heise posting shortly after. So you told me something I already knew and yes, I feel offended by this. It shows that you didn't read the whole thread wholeheartedly but just wanted to show us how clever you are. Just a matter of netiquette.

The rest of your posting simply shows that you either didn't read my posting properly (again) or that you just didn't understand it. In any case it's probably useless to argue about that.

"People like me" quickly get bored explaining the same thing several times or correcting wrong quotations.
I wonder of you even tried CloneDVD of if this is just the usual world conspiracy stuff from the heise forum...

wumpi

19th June 2003, 14:43

Originally posted by 0xdeadbeef
@wumpi:
Hm? Don't want to start an argument here. It should be obvious to anyone that 80% of the stuff posted on the heise forum is complete rubbish posted by bored male students. That's why I never registered there. So why should I care about the heise forum trolls in this case? Besides, some guys whacked on the trolls, too.

And yes, you referred to one of my posting but overlooked the one in which I commented about the heise posting shortly after. So you told me something I already knew and yes, I feel offended by this. It shows that you didn't read the whole thread wholeheartedly but just wanted to show us how clever you are. Just a matter of netiquette.

The rest of your posting simply shows that you either didn't read my posting properly (again) or that you just didn't understand it. In any case it's probably useless to argue about that.

"People like me" quickly get bored explaining the same thing several times or correcting wrong quotations.
I wonder of you even tried CloneDVD of if this is just the usual world conspiracy stuff from the heise forum... Oh dear. I pity you. Every additional word said is a word wasted.

twinches

19th June 2003, 15:04

Originally posted by 0xdeadbeef
Image Quality is a better than with DVDShrink 2.3, even though I kept Menus.

Did you even look at the screenshots posted above. unzip all of the .jpgs into one folder and then get a viewer like ACDsee that you can just page up and page down between the pictures in the folder. When switching like this between the pictures it is eaiser to see the difference between the 4 pictures than when you do a side by side view. When doing page up / page down you can see the picture "move" and you will notice the difference in certain pixles.

And then you will notice a big difference in quality. You can see that CloneDvd is by far the worst out of the 3. DVD2one is pretty bad too. And here I was using DVD2one almost exclusively. There is hardly any difference between the dvdshink and original image. As you see very few changes when switching between the jpgs. I'm going to start using DVDshink 2.3 from now on.

0xdeadbeef

19th June 2003, 15:36

@twinches:
About the screenshots by royal: all shots look pretty much compressed. Even the original is very blurred and has already visible block artefacts in the fireball. Also, this is a NTSC movie with an extremely large black border compared to the PAL DVD I tried.
But agreed, for this special frame, CloneDVD sucks as does DVD2One (which version?). I hope all these shots are all "movie only" or all "full dvd", since it's not said explicitly.

I made my own tests with "Brazil" (movie only). Funny enough, my own result are the other way round. Indeed, I just tested DVD2One 1.2.0 with variable bitrate and in the only screenshot I compared up to now, it had a better quality than DVDShrink. Even in this frame, some parts looked better than with CloneDVD and some looked worse.

This goes to show that the selection of the movie and even more important that of the screenshot will dramatically influence the test result. Especially with variable bitrate, it's very unlikely that one transcoder produces lower quality than the other in every single frame. A good transcoder will try to reduce frames the more the less detail they have. Then again if you compare this very frame to that produced by a bad transcoder, the bad transcoder will probably win on this frame since it didn't reduce the bitrate so much. Were "good" and "bad" are no absolute terms. A generally good transcoder may fail in a selected frame/scene/movie.

Furthermore as I wrote in the CCE thread, comparing screenshots (of I-frames?) is not the whole truth. For a fair comparison, you would need to compare whole sequences frame by frame. I can't do that easily and have to rely on test results of people I trust.

But back to my statement you quoted: I should have written: for the movie (Brazil) I tried and the (in this case: several) screenshots I compared, DVDClone seemed to have a better quality than DVDShrink 2.3. Agreed?

EDIT:
Now I also compared quality of IC7 with extras ripped (registry hacks). Admittedly, visual quality of IC7 is far superior to the other tools. No surprise though, since it also does the most processing.

ashley

22nd June 2003, 11:17

I think this program is pretty good. As long as the film isn't too long, it makes it easy to do a movie and menu copy. Done a few with good enough results for me.

Richk50

25th June 2003, 12:53

"DVD95Copy and DVDXCopy Xpress use the same engine."

Did DVDXCopy purchase the dvd95copy engine or just copy it?
I think we have to give Elby CloneDVD a little time. It just came out, and the company has an excellent track record. I'm sure they'll tweak it until it's a very good product.

DMagic1

26th June 2003, 09:06

Originally posted by Richk50
"DVD95Copy and DVDXCopy Xpress use the same engine."

Did DVDXCopy purchase the dvd95copy engine or just copy it?
I think we have to give Elby CloneDVD a little time. It just came out, and the company has an excellent track record. I'm sure they'll tweak it until it's a very good product.

If they do then the finished product is completely different. Huge difference in picture quality.

0xdeadbeef

26th June 2003, 10:29

I relied on the measurements of german magazine c't here. The comparison of DVD95Copy (1.5 Beta1) and DVDXcopy Xpress (2.0.0) showed exactly (!) the same bitrate and JND values for the 40 seconds test sequence they compared. They concluded that 321 Studios (Xcopy Xpress) probably bought a licence from DigiMedic (95Copy).

Richk50

26th June 2003, 13:05

"I relied on the measurements of german magazine c't here. The comparison of DVD95Copy (1.5 Beta1) and DVDXcopy Xpress (2.0.0) showed exactly (!) the same bitrate and JND values for the 40 seconds test sequence they compared. They concluded that 321 Studios (Xcopy Xpress) probably bought a licence from DigiMedic (95Copy)."

I wonder if DVDXcopy writes any software at all?

twinches

26th June 2003, 14:40

Originally posted by Richk50
I wonder if DVDXcopy writes any software at all?

I wonder why DVDXcopy is such a bad program and everyone talks bad about it. According to www.ifoedit.com , the guy the wrote ifoedit and vobedit (the software that everyone loves and uses for most of their dvd projects) works for 123 studios and helped develop dvdxcopy, as in his statement below.... Given this was over a year ago and who knows if he still works for them but such a shame for somoene who wrote such great DVD tools, is now working for a large company putting out crappy software.

11.29.02 DVDSplit and DVDBurn development stopped, because functionality moved into DVDXCopy !
I'm sorry, but I had to stop development on DVDSplit, because I moved all functinality into DVDXCopy and will do further development with many new features and enhancments to DVDXCopy.
So I don't have the time to further develop my own products, and it would be mean to take your money though.
Everybody who purchased DVDSplit before will get a special deal for DVDXCopy though!

mrbass

9th July 2003, 10:27

Awesome CloneDVD Guide by MadBob

very well written and answered some of my questions too.

http://club.cdfreaks.com/showthread.php?&threadid=72022

KungFuCow

11th July 2003, 04:24

DVD95Copy and DVDXCopy Xpress share no code, according to Digimedic, the author of DVD95Copy. I do believe that DVD95Copy and DVD Copy Suite do use the same transcoding engine, however.

bous

17th July 2003, 03:43

god this program is HORRIBLE.

KEEPS audio in the unselected titles, keeps video (as discussed before), causes loops in paramount pictures dvds i've tried (talk to her, cowboy bebop).

i want the features in this program but i want them WORKING.

chriskb

17th July 2003, 07:09

Most of my DVDs I wish to back up are protected so this is a useless product as far as i am concerned. Just my opinion, don't want to start an uproar.

0xdeadbeef

17th July 2003, 17:04

Then all of the commercial tools are useless. Then again, you could either buy AnyDVD or just use one of the free descrypters (DVDDecrypter or SmartRipper).

Richk50

17th July 2003, 21:40

"Most of my DVDs I wish to back up are protected so this is a useless product as far as i am concerned. Just my opinion, don't want to start an uproar."

I can't figure out why people don't want to use dvd decryptor or smart ripper. They are very easy to use, do a great job, and are free.

digitalman

23rd July 2003, 16:51

Originally posted by Richk50
"Most of my DVDs I wish to back up are protected so this is a useless product as far as i am concerned. Just my opinion, don't want to start an uproar."

I can't figure out why people don't want to use dvd decryptor or smart ripper. They are very easy to use, do a great job, and are free.

They probably don't know about because it is against the law where they are from to read guides on how to back up DVDs. :)