Why the conversion?

[SonofPhatty2x4]

A friend of mine asked me this question the other day and it kinda stumped me.

Why covert your VOB's?
My response was so I could take a 6 gig VOB output from a DVD and convert to a 800 MB file.

Again he asked - Why? A 400 GB hard drive is only $250. Why not just rip the DVD to this drive and be done with it. You have a perfect copy of the DVD with no loss. You already have a player that can read and play VOB's. You don't have a laptop so space is not a concern. So again, why convert, especially if it will take you longer to convert than it will to watch it?

I will have to admit that I am stumped here. $250 for 400 GB hard drive is hard to argue with - everyone can afford that (if you can't go grab a temp job flipping burgers at McDonalds or Burger King for 2 weeks).

Can anyone help out here?

[gircobain]

1. Not every place in the world has 400GB HDs for $250
2. Not every place in the world pays that much at McDonald's or Burger King
3. You can't stick a HD into a standalone dvd player, although many do play MPEG-4
4. The reason of being of a dvd backup is to preserve the original discs; again you can't achieve that with a HD
5. Why store only X 6gigs DVDs when you can fill the same space with 7*X 800mb files? :D

[dani82]

if you're not going to bother converting your dvds, then, why would they take the time ripping it on your HD; i would rather watch a dvd on my much larger TV, than on my smaller pc monitor

by just ripping it to your HD, it sort of, defends the purpose of ever buying again

[celtic_druid]

Some people have more fun converting than watching it.

[ppera2]

I think that tradition has big rule in all this. If cheap DVD-R discs and burners would appear before 4-5 years situation would be probably different - more SW for DVD backup, less for Mpeg4.
I bought some crappy quality DVD's on street (I mean at newspaper shops, legally) for 2-3 Euro per/item. But they not deserve to make DVD backup. Plus, it's too simple - usually no protection, data is 3-4 GB...
With some filtering, color correction XviD backup looks much better in some cases. Of course, I could make DVD with such filtered video, and I did it too, but only couple times.

[Mug Funky]

Some people have more fun converting than watching it.

signed.

[dvd_maniac]

Well. I have over 1000 dvds and have converted a little over 700 so far. I have 4x250GB hard drives in Raid5 (ends up being 710GB) and I also have 2x400GB drives as well. I encode my movies using Nero Digital AVC into 500MB video files. I do not have enough room to JUST rip them even though I have a decent amount of room. If my DVDs averaged 6GB each them 1000 of them would be 6TB I only have about 1.5TB.

[zilog jones]

I will have to admit that I am stumped here. $250 for 400 GB hard drive is hard to argue with - everyone can afford that
No they can't. I'm a student, and If I had that kind of money to spend I'd be using it on something much more worthwhile than a hard disk!

(if you can't go grab a temp job flipping burgers at McDonalds or Burger King for 2 weeks).
*Sigh* - it's not that easy...

[darkavatar1470]

Some people have more fun converting than watching it.
uh... I'm have to admitt I buy DVDs for the fun of converting them.....

[unskinnyboy]

I have no life.
If I don't convert, I don't know what else I will do.
Therefore I convert.

[feedback]

@SonofPhatty2x4
. $250 for 400 GB hard drive is hard to argue with - everyone can afford that (if you can't go grab a temp job flipping burgers at McDonalds or Burger King for 2 weeks).
This is a multi-cultural forum... Doom9 is visited by people all over the world.

What do you think McDonalds pays in Argentina....how long would it take to make $250.00 U.S. Dollars in Africa? You are being insensitive to the world economies and the shambles some of them are in.

There are developers that post here from France and elsewhere that are highly skilled and unemployed.

You must be from the U.S.A., as am I, but please think before you speak.
Don't assume anything! :sly:

[Shinigami-Sama]

@SonofPhatty2x4

This is a multi-cultural forum... Doom9 is visited by people all over the world.

What do you think McDonalds pays in Argentina....how long would it take to make $250.00 U.S. Dollars in Africa? You are being insensitive to the world economies and the shambles some of them are in.

There are developers that post here from France and elsewhere that are highly skilled and unemployed.

You must be from the U.S.A., as am I, but please think before you speak.
Don't assume anything! :sly:
my point exactly
I live in B.C. Canada
400gb drives are hard to come by up here, I;ve only seen 3 so far, and for $205USD I;d rather get webhosting<$196uad/2year :P> where I could theoritcialy make money, than a new HDD, granted I do need another one atm but after that one I"ll have no more bays in my PC

[SonofPhatty2x4]

if you're not going to bother converting your dvds, then, why would they take the time ripping it on your HD; i would rather watch a dvd on my much larger TV, than on my smaller pc monitor

by just ripping it to your HD, it sort of, defends the purpose of ever buying again

Missing a point here - Not to watch on a monitor. The DVD would be ripped to a large storage device (like a NSLU2 NAS device) and then streamed to a modded X-Box.


@SonofPhatty2x4

This is a multi-cultural forum... Doom9 is visited by people all over the world.

What do you think McDonalds pays in Argentina....how long would it take to make $250.00 U.S. Dollars in Africa? You are being insensitive to the world economies and the shambles some of them are in.

I don't believe I am being insensitve. If for you, money is so hard to come by, then you should be concerning yourself with shelting yourself from the elements, getting food and water - not how are you going to convert a dvd to some different format. If $250 U.S. is a major amount of money, it most definately should be spent more effectively than buying a hard drive.


There are developers that post here from France and elsewhere that are highly skilled and unemployed.

You must be from the U.S.A., as am I, but please think before you speak.
Don't assume anything! :sly:

I thank you for your kind wisdom of reminding me to think before I speak (actually this would by type, but I shall not digress). Your assiduity to the negative in my question leads me to truly believe that you have missed my point, which I will attempt to state in a less offensive manner.

Why convert DVD's to a different format? A 400 GB drive costs $250. I can afford that. My friend can afford that. Anyone that can afford to rip dozens to hundreds of legal DVD's (you had to get the DVD's somehow, either buying them or renting them) can more than likely afford $250. Anyone that is located in an area where the average unemployment is below 5% and/or there is some type of minimum hourly wage at a high enough rate to be above that nation's considered poverty line can probably find some type of temporary work for some undertermined amount of time to raise $250 for a 400 GB hard drive.

Obviously if you are located where you daily concern is how to get food, you are not going to be worrying about the price of hard drives. If your located in a higher than 5% unemployment area, you are not going to be worrying about the price of hard drives. If you are located in an area where hourly wages look more like a daily pay,you are not going to be worrying about the price of hard drives.

Your simple platitudes don't bode well. Writing out paragraphs of painfully obvious ideas/concepts/examples so as not to rile shouldn't be necessary either. You request that I think before I speak and don't assume anything - I make the same request of you, plus an additional - please afford me a modicum of latitude in the brevity of my question.

[Shinigami-Sama]

or else you could watch it on your tv which wil be conventitly located within an s-vid cable's lenth of your pc..

[dani82]

you never mention anything about streaming

i guess i really am missing the point; you're going to take your pc and frameserve the dvd to your xbox, so you can watch it on your tv

with "your" xbox, couldn't you just rip it to the xbox HD (now, that i think about it, that's probably what you meant)

[SonofPhatty2x4]

you never mention anything about streaming

i guess i really am missing the point; you're going to take your pc and frameserve the dvd to your xbox, so you can watch it on your tv

with "your" xbox, couldn't you just rip it to the xbox HD (now, that i think about it, that's probably what you meant)

Actually it would be to a NAS like device (NSLU2). I have 2 media devices that are capable of receiving streamed DVD's at the same time - but the concept is the same.

Don't get me wrong, I do convert. I just couldn't come up with a suitable answer to my friend's question

[rjgn]

Sorry but you ARE making assumptions.

Over here in the uk a 400gig hard drive costs around £200. Why would I spend that much money when I've got a 12 month old daughter to look after, bills and debt to pay off? Heck I'm saving up to buy a new kitchen at the moment. Some things come first.

That's NOT to say I can't afford to buy dvd's every so often and make good use of the hard drive space I have. Which in my server machine is currently just over 1TB. But even this is starting getting full. After all I've been buying dvd's for years. Although it's mostly tv series I back up in order to stream to my xbox.

Some people CAN afford to just shove in a new hard drive, but they have other priorities that come first which means they can't just shell out the money when needed. So they make best use of what they have. In which case conversion comes in very handy.

With your logic it doesn't matter how expensive a hobby is, if you can afford it just keep taking the easy route no matter what it costs. Quick question: are you married? ;)

EDIT:

Plus there's the fact that dvd's can easily mount up even if you don't spend alot on them.

I'm into sci-fi and buy ALOT of tv on dvd. Much of it relatively cheap via sales or R4 discs.

Say I buy 6 tv series each with around 6 seasons. With each season using about 6 discs. That's 6x6x6 = 216 discs alone. Multiply that by say an average of 7gig. It gives you a grand total of 1512 gig just for collecting 6 different tv series!! That's not even taking into consideration my film collection.

[Pyscrow]

I do exactly that, rip em , shrink em and store em on secondary hard drives through my home network, (obviously at single layer size of 4.5gig each).

I let my kids feed their own DVD player, so I keep the ones they like handy on the hard drives all the time (and believe me I need em), otherwise onto DVD's they go, (Originals locked away) then after a few months when I need the space, the older ones get bumped. I find I only need a few hundred Gigs.

I have never and probably will never bother converting a whole movie to DivX or Xvid, I dont post em on the net (or download em off the net for that matter), so have no real use for the hours of encoding it involves compared to a simple shrink, not when blank DVD's are less than 30 cents each!.

I do however use Xvid extensivley for the porno clips I post and download off the net (Amature stuff before you Moderator types start frothing at the mouth). Find it to be very useful for that! :devil:

[niamh]

Some people have more fun converting than watching it.

heh :D

PS: A lot of converting has nothing to do with DVD but with TV captures, this is where there is the most fun to be had. Granted with the fall in prices of hardware, mpeg4 compression isn't so important as it was before, possibly; but this is thinking more in the future, rather than the past. And there are places where hardware is most definitely more expensive than others too :)

(edited for PS)

[tigerman8u]

Some people have more fun converting than watching it.

To me alot of the fun is using different programs with different settings to see which program gives best results/time

[SonofPhatty2x4]

Sorry but you ARE making assumptions.

Over here in the uk a 400gig hard drive costs around £200. Why would I spend that much money when I've got a 12 month old daughter to look after, bills and debt to pay off? Heck I'm saving up to buy a new kitchen at the moment. Some things come first.

That's NOT to say I can't afford to buy dvd's every so often and make good use of the hard drive space I have. Which in my server machine is currently just over 1TB. But even this is starting getting full. After all I've been buying dvd's for years. Although it's mostly tv series I back up in order to stream to my xbox.

Some people CAN afford to just shove in a new hard drive, but they have other priorities that come first which means they can't just shell out the money when needed. So they make best use of what they have. In which case conversion comes in very handy.

With your logic it doesn't matter how expensive a hobby is, if you can afford it just keep taking the easy route no matter what it costs. Quick question: are you married? ;)

EDIT:

Plus there's the fact that dvd's can easily mount up even if you don't spend alot on them.

I'm into sci-fi and buy ALOT of tv on dvd. Much of it relatively cheap via sales or R4 discs.

Say I buy 6 tv series each with around 6 seasons. With each season using about 6 discs. That's 6x6x6 = 216 discs alone. Multiply that by say an average of 7gig. It gives you a grand total of 1512 gig just for collecting 6 different tv series!! That's not even taking into consideration my film collection.

Sorry. No. I am not making assumptions. After making my first post I release what I did do incorrectly - I should have put in quotes the conversation between myself and the friend.

It should look like this:


************START STORY*************************
A friend of mine asked me this question the other day and it kinda stumped me.

[CONVERSATION WITH FRIEND]Why covert your VOB's?
My response was so I could take a 6 gig VOB output from a DVD and convert to a 800 MB file.

Again he asked - Why? A 400 GB hard drive is only $250. Why not just rip the DVD to this drive and be done with it. You have a perfect copy of the DVD with no loss. You already have a player that can read and play VOB's. You don't have a laptop so space is not a concern. So again, why convert, especially if it will take you longer to convert than it will to watch it?

I will have to admit that I am stumped here. $250 for 400 GB hard drive is hard to argue with - everyone can afford that (if you can't go grab a temp job flipping burgers at McDonalds or Burger King for 2 weeks). [/CONVERSATION WITH FRIEND]

Can anyone help out here?

***********END STORY**************************

I believe you have missed the point of the question.

I now understand that my selection of words and wording has been extremely poor for something I took to be elementary.

Let me boil down the question a bit more. This would be between me and my friend now - "Why would you do a conversion process which takes longer to accomplish than to watch the movie? With the price of a 400 GB at $250, why not just rip the DVD to the hard drive and avoid the lossy data conversion all together by keeping the DVD in it's own VOB structure?"

I could not come up with a suitable answer. I can afford the $250 for a hard drive. He can too. Please get off money!! If you are going to point out prices of hard drives and how people can't always afford that amount of money, you have missed the point of the questions, heck you have missed the point of the title of the thread.

I would simply like some answers as to why I or anyone else who can afford hard drives would actually take the time to convert as apposed to just ripping and keeping the structure. Nothing more. Please, please, please stop reading in global economic problems and complicating a rather simple question.

[SonofPhatty2x4]

I do exactly that, rip em , shrink em and store em on secondary hard drives through my home network, (obviously at single layer size of 4.5gig each).

I let my kids feed their own DVD player, so I keep the ones they like handy on the hard drives all the time (and believe me I need em), otherwise onto DVD's they go, (Originals locked away) then after a few months when I need the space, the older ones get bumped. I find I only need a few hundred Gigs.

I have never and probably will never bother converting a whole movie to DivX or Xvid, I dont post em on the net (or download em off the net for that matter), so have no real use for the hours of encoding it involves compared to a simple shrink, not when blank DVD's are less than 30 cents each!.

I do however use Xvid extensivley for the porno clips I post and download off the net (Amature stuff before you Moderator types start frothing at the mouth). Find it to be very useful for that! :devil:

Ahhhh, this is along the lines of an answer I was looking for. Thnk you so much!

[rjgn]

Then in that case, there is no reason to convert. But then that should have been obvious to you from the start, without you having to ask the question here. I don't mean to sound overly harsh but converting to a different format is obviously pointless. Regardless of how much time and effort you put into the process converting from one lossy codec to another IS going to mean you suffer from some, even if very little, quality loss.

If you've got the space just rip to ISO and stream that way.

Most people come to this forum having already decided they want to convert and have their own reasons for doing so. They then want to find out the best way to go about it.

Ahhhh, this is along the lines of an answer I was looking for. Thnk you so much!

I assume though that your friend won't even need to bother shrinking down to single layer size. Especialy if he's bothered about quality. If as you say money's not a problem best just to keep the full iso rather than shrink.

[webwonk]

Uhm, yeah. That's what I do too - convert for the sake of converting - multiple formats, multiple parameters. Sometimes it is the journey not the destination :)

[guada 2]

Celtic druid says that:
" Some people have more fun converting than watching it. " :D

I would rather say than it is while converting that one arrives to recognize itself. :D

To be honest, I do that by pleasure. ;)

[*.mp4 guy]

Some people have more fun converting than watching it.

Thats definately why I rip dvd's.