DVD-TO-AVI

With hard dives providing more and more storage space, archiving and backup should not be a problem. Affordable HDDs offer hundreds of GB and if you are looking for more, you can also get high end disks with more than a few TB of storing capacity.
Moreover, fiber optics provides users with fast transfer rates and makes data migration to online storage servers or via peer to peer applications pretty accessible.
But if you want to make sure you backup you DVDs and save some disk space while doing it, a converter should come in handy. DVD-TO-AVI comes with a simple interface that allows even beginners to get the hang of it.
You must load a DVD and select the destination for the converted file to be saved to. Press start and provide a few details regarding the output file's quality and let the application do its thing. It is as simple as that.
If you are familiar with video encoding, you could select the codec to use for the conversion and assure the right quality for your movies. Choose the screen size and the output file's size on disk, the resolution and the converting speed. Otherwise just press Begin and the application will use its default settings.
The conversion takes from a few minutes (22:17 minutes during our test, with Microsoft Video 1 codec, for 30 minutes of playback at 720X480 and 25 Hz) up to two hours depending on conversion settings. The quality of the output file greatly depends on the configuration you choose for the conversion so be careful when you make the choices, for quick encoding comes with quality setbacks.
You can opt to convert only specific chapters from the DVD, selecting the captions and audio you are interested in, the preview function enabling you to easily browse between chapters. The advanced options will also come in handy when wanting to adjust the conversion speed, IDCT mode and bitrate.
All in all, DVD-TO-AVI is a reliable and relatively fast DVD converter that you can use with confidence when encoding your DVD collection.