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

Grab a Cup of Coffee - but Not a Big One
Transcoding video is one of the most system intensive things you can ask of your computer. It will bring the most powerful system to its knees - but improvements have been made to speed up the process in 2006, and things are expected to get even better as we start to see CPUs and GPUs that will accelerate video encoding. Ripping a 2 hour and 25 minute DVD to a 320 x 240 quality 23 file on my laptop, powered by an Intel Pentium M CPU running at 1.86 Ghz, took a mere 42 minutes. That’s almost 4x realtime speed, which is an impressive feat. The resolution and quality you set have a significant impact on the speed of the encoding, as does the CPU. I'm unsure if CloneDVD mobile is able to tap into both cores if you're fortunate enough to have a dual core CPU (either Intel or AMD).

While your machine is chugging away at the rip and transcode, you can view a snapshot of the progress to ensure everything looks ok, or look at the summary page. Once the process is completed, it will make a really obnoxious sound, which thankfully you can change in the preferences. There's also an option to turn the PC off after transcoding if that's your cup of tea.

Useful and Powerful But I Want More!
CloneDVD Mobile sells for $39 USD, and is worth every penny if you want to save yourself time and hassles. There's a 21 day trial available if you want to take it for a spin first.

What I really want to see is CloneDVD Mobile evolve into something that would accept video files off a hard drive - WMV files, VOB files, DVR-MS (Media Center Edition 2005 TV show files). Give me the ability to feed it all the content I have, whether it's on a DVD or not. I'd also like to see it offer more output options - my Zen Vision:M can play DivX and WMV files, so give me the option to pick which one I want. This may seem like a big change in the application, but if Slysoft wants to keep CloneDVD Mobile competitive, they need to keep up to the other applications that are offering these features. So while I might need to use other applications to do this, I always come back to CloneDVD Mobile when I need to rip a DVD and put it on my portable media player - and I can't give it any higher praise than to say that I use it regularly.

Jason Dunn owns and operates Thoughts Media Inc., a company dedicated to creating the best in online communities. He enjoys mobile devices, digital media content creation/editing, and pretty much all technology. He lives in Calgary, Alberta, Canada with his lovely wife, his sometimes obedient dog, and a whole bunch of DVDs that he wants to rip.