http://www.filesonic.com/file/597788851/Spiderman_1_DvdRip.avi

<a =”http://www.zoombits.co.uk/bluetooth/”>bluetooth mouse</a>

1. DVDs are cheaper than hard drives, on a GB/$ basis.
500GB / 121.5$ = 4.1 GB/$
50 * 4.7GB / 24.88$ = 9.4 GB/$.
A good sale on e.g. 100 pack of Verbatim for 30$ can bring the price to 15.6GB/$.
(GB = 10^9 bytes, for hard drive sizes and 4.7GB DVDs).

I found a sale on DVD+R DL discs that was a 15 pack for ~20$, IIRC. That’s 6GB/$, which is still better than hard drives. They’re not great discs, though. I’m still hoping holographic or something new will come along and redefine storage.

Also, HDs don’t scale very well. They use electricity (and require cooling) just sitting there idle. Although they can spin down if you don’t have any live data on a given drive. I guess if you have external drives you can just plug in the one that has the movie you want. Still, I don’t find my DVD collection too inconvenient. The worst part is figuring out which 3-6 movies to put on a disc together, so I can sort my collection in some kind of order. And so I can copy the disc for a friend who liked one movies, and might like the others. This problem goes away with HD rips that fit on exactly one disc. (I don’t like these 1.5DVD rips at all.)

HD storage has a lot of advantages (and I would like to just have all my movies online), but DVD is cheaper unless you are buying expensive dual-layer discs.

2. video quality: video on HD-DVD, Blu-Ray, and DVD is at very high bit-rates to look good even given the restrictions of the format standards. e.g. the video actually includes the black bars at top and bottom, so the codec has to spend lots of extra bits on the sharp edges, and it interferes with motion compensation for things entering or leaving the picture.

x264 takes a lot of CPU time to make highly compressed h.264 video. I have no idea what kind of encoder settings commercial HD-DVD and Blu-Ray use, but I imagine they just throw a lot of bitrate at it, instead of cranking up frameref and so on.

It’s my guess that a lot of movies could look good in 4.4GB 720p, instead of 6.6GB. The major factor in compressibility is film grain or other noise. That’s why Pixar-style animation compresses so well, because there’s no noise. Still parts of the picture can be predicted perfectly from the previous frame, so it doesn’t cost any bits to do it. This is a major reason why downscaling to 720p helps compressibility so much: the random noise goes down with the number of pixels. A slightly less detailed picture that’s free of compression artifacts is much preferable to a 1080p that looks swimmy or blocky or something.

H.264 allows multiple reference frames (e.g. frameref=8) so in a scene with bright flashes of light (e.g. muzzle flashes), the picture after the flash can reference the picture before the flash, instead of having to spend enough bits to reproduce all the details from scratch. That’s another reason h.264 kicks so much ass on animation, because animation is often repetitive. (I’m surprised pr0n rips don’t use h.264 more often…)

3. I download HD rips from my ISP’s news servers, with fills from octanews. This way I don’t need to use any upload bandwidth, and I only have to pay octanews for ~1/10th of the size of a typical movie. My ISP has terrible retention and completion, but much better than nothing. I only torrent movies I really want, and in that case I’d spend the time/bandwidth for an HD rip. I generally only burn movies to DVD if the quality is worth archiving. So generally xvid rips don’t qualify unless they’re made with a recent xvid and/or high bitrate. Most copies of old movies floating around are scene releases made right around when the DVD first came out, and usually suck. I have ~500GB of hard drive space for movies, some of which is 6.6GB HD rips that I haven’t dealt with yet, or HD rips that I’m planning to recode to a smaller size to fit on one DVD, or whatever. And a bunch of DVD copies that I’m going to transcode eventually… When I find a good copy of a movie I can burn, I delete the xvid rip. (Yes, I’m addicted to collecting maybe more than watching movies.) h.264 is wonderful for dvd rips, not just HD. I have a binder with ~200 DVDs in it, and a couple spindles of dvds. e.g. one for all of MST3K.

I have a computer with a nice LCD and nice speakers (Logitech Z-5500), so I don’t use my TV at all anymore except when multiple people are watching. (Mainly because computer isn’t set up for many people to sit in front of it).

How were you able to get your XBox360 to play these x264 files?

So what size can you shrink an HD-DVD or a Blu-Ray DVD down to? I would think 1.4GB is not enough, especially using an older format such as DivX.

I am looking for about 4-5GB versions of HD-DVD’s, hopefully using x264.

Despite what you may have heard, not everyone in the U.S. is wealthy. The reason DSL exists for people without the means to purchase high speed bandwidth. Some parts of the country are also very remote, like farmland and mountain regions, and may not be serviced by high speed bandwidth.

Do you expect all of those people to move to cities just to experience hig speed bandwidth? For some, their jobs may force them to live out of the reach of civilization. Should they not be entitled to high speed bandwidth and also to enjoy a movie or two?