Digital Home Thoughts: Taking Your DVDs with You Using CloneDVD Mobile

The Dark Art of DVD Ripping
Ripping and encoding a DVD for use in another format has always been a dark art. I first experimented with the techniques when I wanted to watch DVDs that I owned on my Pocket PC back in 2001. It was like voodoo – first you needed a tool to break the DeCSS encryption on commercial DVDs and rip the video and audio files from the DVD. Then you'd typically need to mix the audio and video streams together into a single AVI file, and finally take that AVI file and transcode it to a re-sized MPEG or WMV file (this was before DivX was popular). This process usually involved no less than three or four different programs, usually freeware applications created by well-intentioned programmers that seemed to have no concept of user interface design.

The programs were hard to use, took long step by step tutorials to explain, and the error rate of something going wrong was always high – I often ended up with videos that had the wrong aspect ratio, were cropped wrong, had poor quality audio, or were far too compressed for good quality. In short, it was an ugly experience.

Things Got Better
Thankfully, things have changed and in the past year we've seen a variety of programs that do most of the above in one fell swoop (decryption being the notable exception), much to my delight. One of these tools is CloneDVD Mobile. Like most of the tools in this category, CloneDVD Mobile doesn't crack DVD encryption, so if you want to put a few episodes of The Shield (great show!) onto your Pocket PC for viewing, you'll need to first use a tool to remove the DVD encryption. By far the best tool for this is AnyDVD, which I've reviewed separately.

So what does CloneDVD Mobile do? In short it, it accepts video from DVDs and encodes the video to match the specifications of various portable video playback devices. That sounds simple, but it's surprisingly difficult to do properly. The list is constantly growing, but at the time of this writing CloneDVD Mobile supports the Sony PSP, Apple iPod Video, iAudio X5, Epson P-2000/P-4000, a variety of Nokia/Motorola/Samsung phones, Zen Vision and Zen Vision:M, and Windows Mobile Smartphones. It can also convert to DivX for playback on your PC if you simply want to rip a DVD for watching on your laptop. It's worth noting that CloneDVD Mobile does in-place encoding, unlike some other products that first copy the entire DVD to your hard drive. That method is time-consuming and also requires 4-6 GB of storage space. Slysoft's approach is much smarter.

Using CloneDVD Mobile
Using the program is simple: you put in the DVD, and walk through the step by step wizard. If you've ever done the manual method, this program will seem like it's pure magic. The first step is when you select the type of device that the video will be optimized for. Clicking Next takes you to step two, where you point the application at your DVD and the VIDEO_TS folder - it would be nice if the application was smart enough to see the inserted DVD and find the video folder automatically, but it's not a major hassle. What it will do automatically, however, is select the longest video file - you don't have to mess with merging multiple VOB files. It will also allow you to preview the video file, in the case of DVDs with multiple small video files (TV shows for instance). You can also trim the video file if you only want a segment. A nice improvement here would be the ability to see individual chapters and tag which ones you wanted.

Next, you're taken to a screen where you can select the audio track and subtitles. Since it's unlikely that you'll need Dolby six channel audio on your portable media player, you'd pick Dolby two channel audio. I normally skip subtitles, but they might be useful to people who are into foreign films.

The final step in setting up the project is where you see a summary of the audio and video input settings, and specify the output settings. Full-resolution NTSC (North American) DVDs are 720 x 480 in resolution. CloneDVD will automatically crop the video, reducing the resolution, and give you resolution choices appropriate for the device you selected in the first step. For instance, with my Zen Vision:M player I'd want to use 320 x 180 resolution is watching on the device screen, or the next step up (likely 640 x 360) if I was going to connect my player to a TV set and watch it there.

There's a video quality slider, and this is where I think CloneDVD Mobile runs into trouble - the default is 23, but what does that mean? There's no display of bit rate, and bit rate is what I understand. You can adjust the quality upwards/downwards, and the estimated file output size will change, but there's no way to understand what the quality number means without a lot of practice and experiments. I'd much rather see an option here for showing the bit rate of the video encoding. In fact, it's somewhat illogical that this option is even given because most players support a specific bit rate setting in addition to resolution, so it should have a drop-down menu for the supported player profile bit rates. Also on this screen is a check-box for de-interlacing the video, which is a must-have if you're watching the video file on anything other than a TV set. You can specify the location to store the ripped video file, and the label to give it. After that, a click on "Go" and the process starts. Easy, right?