Copywrited Video Tapes

[Cecil]

I want to make cds out of my collection of movies that i have purchased. (they are copywrited) Is there anyway to do this.

Please explain in detail cause i'm a dumbass

[KRSESQ]

Legal issues aside, You may run into a problem if you are using a conventional CD burner. A typical CD will hold only 650 mb of data. Even at the best available compression, this will give you only 30 to 60 minutes of video per disk (and this may even be optimistic). In the long run it may be cheaper and easier simply to buy your favorite movies on DVD (unless you enjoy a real challenge!).

[coolfish]

legally, is he not allowed to do this as a personal back-up?

coolfish

[RBryant]

Yes, legally he can make as many copies of his own movies that he wants. It is called "fair use". As long as he has legally purchased the movies, he can make as many copies of them as he wants. He just can't give them to anyone else or sell them.

If you want to fit a whole movie on 1 CD then use the new DiVX codec that just came out. No, it is not related to DVD's evil twin, it just has the same name for some stupid reason. It is really just an MPEG-4 codec, but unlike M$'s it is not designed for streaming and so it uses all that extra space that M$'s uses for streaming redundancy and just packs extra picture quality into it. The result is a whole movie on 1 650 MB CD at a quality level far far above that of VCD MPEG1.

[Tinnes]

I played around with MPEG-4 and I was not impressed with the results. It was no where no where near the quality I got from the Panasonic MPEG-1 encoder. Although I agree the size is very good.

[andrewh]

If the size is very good, then increase it. try MPEG4 and MPEG1 at the same bit rate, frame rate and picture size. Now tell us MPEG4 is no good.

Remember to use an encoder that is NOT encoding for streaming as mentioned at the begining of this thread.

Andrew

[ScottV]

Sounds interesting. Please can somebody tell me where I can get this new DiVX codec from.

[tbrett]

http://members.tripod.com/dvdown/

Plus a lot of other cool things

[ScottV]

Great. Got it.

Thanks a lot.

[KRSESQ]

Cecil:
Important question: Do you want to be able to play these video CDs in a commercial DVD player or be content to view them on your computer?
If the information in the above link is correct, MPEG4 can only be played on a computer with the proper codecs installed, not in a stand-alone DVD player.
Or am I missing something?

[tbrett]

You're right it can only be played in a computer, unless a DVD player is released with mpeg4 (hopefuly soon)

[sweeper]

Is it possible to feed this FleskMPEG encoder with Matrox MJPEG files? I want to convert my home made movies into this promissing mpeg4mp3 format to burn on CD.
Thanks.