Standalone to Standalone DVD copying Yes or NO?

[scoutthedoggie]

I need some feed back from you guys and girls. Three questions. Giv e me reasons why I am right or wrong.

#1.
I have pal who see's no problem linking a DVD player to his panasonic DVD recorder and copying DVDs from the player to a Panasonic standalone recorder. He does this when certain discs will not play on his Panasonic recorder, I say its the ultimate NO NO, I am right or wrong. He knows people capture old VHS/Beta to DVD this way so cannot understand why its wrong to copy DVDs this way.



#2.
He has a Panasonic E85 with a hard drive, at times he also puts a disc in the disc tray and copies it to his hard drive on the E85, then cuts out stuff he does not like and adds stuff he likes then burns back to disc to trade out, now I may be worn but I still consider this a no no as I am sure its still a lossy way to copy, minor perhaps but still not really the way to do it.



#3
I think that all copying and editing of DVDs should only ever be done on a PC/Mac etc using editing and authoring software IE TMPGENC or somthing similar, am I right or wrong.


The guy is asking me for advice and when I give it he's like "You might be right, but no one else has complained so I see no problem" He doubts me.
So your feed back on each question is appreciated even if I am totally wrong, I am gonna send him a load of your replies to let him see its not just me who is being fussy.
I hope?
Thanks
John

[slewofboots]

If the goal is to do a copy of a non-CSS encrypted DVD, just use your run-of-the-mill DVD burning software to do a full disc copy. Turn on verification so you can be sure the data is bit-for-bit accurate then, just to be safe, open the newly copied disc up with DVDShrink and see if it can read it. This has proven to be an effective way of testing DVDs after you copy them, from my experience.

Why do you think method #2 is lossy?

As far as #3 goes, I am no expert on editing DVDs (except when it comes to using DVDShrink). Sorry.

[Branston]

Originally Posted by slewofboots

Why do you think method #2 is lossy?

I have the same Panasonic machine myself. I'm no expert, but I'll have a bash...

Copying to the internal hard drive involves playing the DVD and recording it in real time onto the hard drive, as if the hard drive was another stand alone player. So the recording is internal, but still a generation down - better quality than the good old days of hooking up two VHS recorders with coaxial cable of course, but you're still re-encoding the video from the original quality to the SP or XP settings on the Panasonic.

I've noticed that shows I've tape off TV on the SP setting show up on torrent sites as much smaller files - it seems that sampling directly into a computer and maybe even demuxing (no idea what that means, but I asked a poster here and that was his explanation) gives broadcast quality and takes up much less memory - my guess is that XP might be encoding shows at too high a rate, but Panasonic SP can be a little blocky at times, so you can't win.... and if I'm not mistaken, the audio recording is much better at the XP setting than the SP setting too...

Hope that's cleared it up - unless I'm completely wrong

[Five]

I agree on all counts. I'm more of an audio guy, but it doesn't take a genius to realize the drawbacks of a double-encode. Potentially there is some way to do it with a direct stream copy, but seems to me that would require a pc.

[AAR.oner]

#1 & #2 are definite no-no's...re-encoding is like copying from vhs to vhs, and there is a loss of quality, simple as that...also re: #2, i don't really think someone should be cutting up the work that some other taper did just because you don't like a song or something...if its just for his personal use then whatever, but to trade it out, its just common courtesy to trade the riginal unless you've made a serious upgrade

[scoutthedoggie]

Guys thanks for your replies, I took bits from all your posts and sent them to my pal to try and get him to change his ways. I could have directed him to this forum to read your replies but I cannot tell him about this site and then let him start trading with people in the Den if he is ripping other peoples work apart and doing Standalone to Standalone copies etc.
In the 80s he was a class tape trader, one of the best and a nice guy but with DVD he is not totally lost but just a little misguided by a few other bad traders, once he gets his act together I will tell him about the Traders Den.
John

[Dreamrafa]

Dude, no one should be copying dvds from standalone player to standalone recorder... i think many people do that because they dont know, but there is quality loose on that process.. that definetly damage the quality on the trading circles