I've done it before and WM9 generally produces superior results to DIVX. It obviously isn't perfect (going from one lossy format to another never is, especially when MPEG-2 wasn't designed to be transcoded) but it's about as good as it gets for DVD backup.Darth Wong wrote:My personal suspicion is that they would end up having a lot more 2-disc sets when they try to do high-quality encoding jobs, because if you use a high-compression codec such as WM9 or DIVX to pound a 4.7GB MPEG2 DVD down to 800MB, I doubt there will be no quality loss.
WM9 HD I haven't played with (it's not like I have any HD sources to work with) but I doubt it would be worth it except to code from uncompressed masters (or at least transcodeable lightly compressed masters) the way they do in film/DVD studios. So I don't think we can really compare the two since WM9 HD will almost solely be used in this function.
No doubt, I'm just glad that Sony has the capability to end this standards war quickly since the last thing I want is a repeat of VHS/Beta. Fortunately Sony has the technology edge over the HD-DVD standard and the Hollywood studios know that Blu-Ray is going to have an install base that will shoot up in the millions during the first few months after the PS3 was released. This will also have the charming effect of lowering Blu-Ray standalone unit prices significantly much like the PS2 did for DVD (ie who would buy a $300 DVD player when you can get a $300 DVD player with a state-of-the-art games console thrown in for free?) so I expect Sony to win on the price front as well, although the PS3 implementation of Blu-Ray might have the recording feature stripped out to save the market of standalone players.I hope so. A new format with substantially increased storage would be a bigger and better step forward.