All,

I'm currently downloading SVCDs and burning them to watch in my Pioneer home DVD player. Not a bad deal, except it results in 2-3 CDs to switch out, which my kids are a bit young to do. So, I've been thinking about buying a DVD recordable, potentially the HP200i DVD+R which I can get for $345, in the hopes of using one continuous play file. So, my questions before I spend the big bucks are as follow:

- Can I download DVD movies rips in their entirety, rather than having to get 2-3 different files? Any mIRC channel recommendations if so?

- Is it possible to convert my multiple SVCDs to a continuous DVD play file? In searching vcdhelp.com it appears as it's not, but perhaps someone has a link to a good guide that does allow this.

- Am I making a mistake leaning toward DVD+R when it seems as if DVD-R is the more common format?

I suppose there's other things I could use a DVD recordable for, but movies for the kids and myself are the primary reason. My thanks in advance to anyone that can help.

torataka

Hmm... I have a DVD-RW drive so dunno about +RW. I know that -R/-RW disks are cheaper and more common...

I download most of my movies in DIVX format as single (approx 650MB files) of kazaa. Then I can convert them to whatever I want. DivX offers the best compression and is OK if I want to watch them on my PC. If I want to burn I need to encode to MPEG2 which increases the filesize a lot. The encoding/conversion proccess can take several hours even on a very fast PC.

Downloading whole, uncompressed DVD rips is not reccomended unless you have a super fast connection as the average DVD will be 5-10 GB. Note that if you rip a DVD yourself most of the DVDs you rent or buy are dual layer and hence more than 4.7GB. To burn them to DVD-R you will need to reencode them to reduce their filesize in most cases...

Merging multiple VCDs I imagine would be easy, but am unaware of the names of any programs that do so... Im just saying I would be very surprised if they didnt exist....

for merging multiple mpg stream U can

use TMPGEnc

file -->mpge tools

:D

Thanks for the answers thus far. Zone-MR, you're right, I wasn't trying to imply that I wanted to download the exact DVD rip. What I was looking for was how it was normally encoded when not a one-to-one copy, so i take it that DiVX is the way to go? And, if I use TMPGEnc as suggested by marcvaleriof will I still be able to get 5-channel sound?

With the help of this forum and vcdhelp, I think I'm getting closer to understanding the DVD burning process better. Sounds like a good way to make the time I spend on my computer more productive, and I'm always interested in learning new things (especially when I can buy cool new hardware such as a DVD recordable!).