RatDVD - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

ratDVD is a proprietary media container file type that supports the same features as DVD-Video

DVD-Video

DVD-Video is a consumer video format used to store digital video on DVD discs, and is currently the dominant consumer video format in Asia, North America, Europe, and Australia. Discs using the DVD-Video specification require a DVD drive and a MPEG-2 decoder...

. Unlike other container formats like Matroska

Matroska

The Matroska Multimedia Container is an open standard free container format, a file format that can hold an unlimited number of video, audio, picture or subtitle tracks in one file. It is intended to serve as a universal format for storing common multimedia content, like movies or TV shows...

, it is designed to accurately mirror the exact feature set of standard DVDs, facilitating round-tripping back to the DVD-Video format. It is typically used to reencode a DVD

DVD

A DVD is an optical disc storage media format, invented and developed by Philips, Sony, Toshiba, and Panasonic in 1995. DVDs offer higher storage capacity than Compact Discs while having the same dimensions....

movie, maintaining all menus and features while reducing significantly the overall size. A typical DVD (usually above 4 gigabyte

Gigabyte

The gigabyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information storage. The prefix giga means 109 in the International System of Units , therefore 1 gigabyte is...

s) can be compressed to about 1 or 2 GB, with some loss in video quality due to recompression.

The file type is supported by a freeware application of the same name released only for the Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...

Operating system

An operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system...

, and is apparently no longer being maintained by its creator, with the latest version dating from 2005. There is speculation that ratDVD was only a preview version (albeit fully functional) of the now commercially sold fluxDVD. While ratDVD contained the features that allowed the home user to create their own archived DVDs, this function has been removed from fluxDVD, allowing only content owners to make and sell fluxDVD archives.

ratDVD works by compressing a full DVD using a proprietary codec

Codec

A codec is a device or computer program capable of encoding or decoding a digital data stream or signal. The word codec is a portmanteau of "compressor-decompressor" or, more commonly, "coder-decoder"...

named "XEB". The resulting ratDVD file can then be played directly in a computer (as long as the needed codec has been installed) by a DirectShow-compatible DVD player, or converted back into standard DVD format.

ratDVD archive is a zip compressed archive. A ratDVD archive files have extensions these are .XML .IFO .VSI .XVO (IFO and XML are uncompressed)

Advantages

ratDVD gained some popularity due to several reasons, in particular the fact that it was very easy to use, and was available at no cost (although it remained proprietary software

Proprietary software

Proprietary software is computer software licensed under exclusive legal right of the copyright holder. The licensee is given the right to use the software under certain conditions, while restricted from other uses, such as modification, further distribution, or reverse engineering.Complementary...

). The ability to greatly compress DVDs while retaining the complete structure (such as menu titles, multiple camera angles, ...) has especially appealed to communities interested in sharing content over network connections.

Processing

Best RatDVD quality, use these settings

A: XEB Constant Average Bitrate = 2048

B: Use audio 'as is' (only use AC3 or PCM)

C: Do not use Convert Audio

D: Make a Profile with above settings

With the above ratDVD playback picture quality is as good. More important that when converted ratDVD back to a real DVD. Very little picture quality is lost and is very near same as the original DVD picture quality.

You can check which ratDVD processing settings were used for any ratDVD archive. By loading a ratDVD archive into ratDVD itself or by using RatCheck (found in the RatAttack Tools v0.2.exe)

Criticism

The author has stated that he will release ratDVD as open source some time in the future, probably under the BSD license, but currently its closed-source nature has sparked some discussion about possible license infringements related to the use of code released under GPL, such as libdvdnav. ratDVD has an option to not install both of the GPL modules it is shipped with, however playback of ratDVD files does not work in that case. Critics have also complained about ratDVD not being a standardized

Standardization

Standardization is the process of developing and implementing technical standards.The goals of standardization can be to help with independence of single suppliers , compatibility, interoperability, safety, repeatability, or quality....

format.

ratDVD is available only for the Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows

operating system

Operating system

, and dependent on Microsoft DirectShow

DirectShow

DirectShow , codename Quartz, is a multimedia framework and API produced by Microsoft for software developers to perform various operations with media files or streams. It is the replacement for Microsoft's earlier Video for Windows technology...

. Additionally, it is not directly supported in popular Windows DVD players, instead requiring people to use the ratDVD program or Windows Media Player to play ratDVD files. More recently, many users have reported being unable to open their ratDVD files at all in versions of Windows later than XP.

[Windows Players that are able play RatDVD]
Sometimes DVD does not load on first (or more) attempt. Then may need to use task manager [Ctrl-Alt-Delete] and delete DVDNavExt.exe before opening the player again to try again to play the DVD. better to do this so playback is smooth and unaffected.

Windows Media Player

The normal windows media player without any plug-ins allows full RatDVD playback incl. navigation - just like the original DVD.

Download from: http://www.microsoft.com

ratDVD movie playback with different audio tracks (languages)

Windows Media Center Edition 2005

Special Windows XP version enhanced for media playback. Cannot be downloaded separately and installed on a standard Windows PC.

Available from Microsoft

Fusion Media Player

Nice all-purpose audio/video media player.

Download from: http://www.fusionmedia.org

Zoom Player

All-purpose audio/video media player. Since it does not render ratDVD files automatically you need to install a custom media graph file. Click here for details.

Download from: http://www.inmatrix.com

KM Player (Korean Media Player)

Korean all-purpose audio/video media player.

Information at: http://www.kmplayer.com

moopeg media player

Small all-purpose audio/video media player.

Download from: http://www.glop.org/moopeg

MediaPortal

Nice all-purpose audio/video media center application.

Download from: http://mediaportal.sourceforge.net

Ashampoo Media Player

All-purpose audio/video media player.

Download from: http://www.ashampoo.com

NPlayer

All-purpose audio/video media player.

Download from: http://www.samo.cz/index.php?id=nplayer0

Full Screen Player

All-purpose audio/video media player.

Download from: http://www.vidon.ru/old/en/download.htm

BS Player

All-purpose audio/video media player. Shows an "Unknown file format" error at the beginning but plays fine if you click "Continue".

Download from: http://www.bsplayer.org

nvDVD

All-purpose audio/video media player from nVIDIA.

Download from: http://www.nvidia.com

Media Player Classic (ratDVD build)

RatAttack Tools (RatBatch, RatCheck, mplayerc with sources for RatCheck, RatBatch and RatDecrypt)

Download from: http://www.afterdawn.com/software/video_software/video_tools/ratattack.cfm

Download from: http://ratattack.cdfreaks.com/

External links

RatDVD (Mirror?) site
discussion about ratDVD and GPL issues
fluxDVD - A commercial application, the successor to ratDVD

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.

Advantages

Processing

Criticism

See also

External links