Posts Tagged ‘merge dvds’

I was recently asked to recommend DVD software for a range of purposes and I realised, from the questions, that there is a bit of confusion regarding which DVD software does what. So I will attempt to clarify this seemingly confusing subject.

The actual difficulty in working out which DVD software would suit you best really arises from the dearth of clear definitions of each type. In addition to that the technology of dealing with DVDs has stabilised through development so that just burning a DVD would hardly be described as rocket science anymore!

This has resulted in many of the DVD software brands branching out into other functions in an effort to attract customers through added features and benefits. This “blurring” of the things you can do with a DVD has resulted in a lack of clarity as to which software you should use to suit your specific requirements.

DVD Copying Software.
This is DVD software that has, as its main purpose, the simple action of copying a DVD onto another DVD. It will commonly achieve this by making a copy on to the hard drive of your computer first then using the copied data to write to a new DVD. Usually this is an automatic process.

A variation of this is DVD Ripping where the software deconstructs the original DVDs contents into its various files and folders while it is being copied to the computer hard drive. This allows some degree of manipulation prior to burning a new DVD. Pure DVD Copying software is very often combined with the ability to make basic edits and changes to parts of the DVD and remove unwanted features like subtitles or extra content.

DVD Conversion Software.
The primary function here is to take the contents of an existing DVD and convert them into another format. For example a home made video DVD being converted to a more compressed video format for uploading on to YouTube or similar or for viewing on a computer.

A good example of a combination of DVD Copying Software and DVD Conversion Software would be a product called DVD Fab. This is software that allows DVD copying in many forms with a high degree of control over the final output combined with the ability to convert the contents of the DVD to other formats.

DVD Burning Software.
The main purpose of DVD burning software is to take data from a computer and transfer it on to a DVD disc. This happens in two ways depending on what is being burned.

For data in the form of documents and folders this is the simple action of copying those items and putting them on a DVD in a way that can be found again.

As for video DVDs it is a little more complicated procedure. There are certain protocols that determine how a video DVD must be written on to a disc. DVD burning software has the ability to understand and create those protocols as it is burning. An example of this would be the DVD Burning ROM of Nero 9. This does, however, lead to another type of DVD software.

DVD Authoring Software.
DVD authoring means to build a standard DVD video structure on to a DVD disc that includes the video, menus, menu buttons, subtitles or any other features you may see on a normal DVD.

The video portion of a DVD is a special video file called MPEG2. If you just burned the MPEG2 on to a disc a DVD player would not be able to recognise or play that file. The file has to be “wrapped” in a certain type of structure for the DVD player to be able to play it.

Additionally, the disc must have menus made so that the player and you can navigate around the disc and play the parts you want. It is the job of DVD authoring software to do all of that. Corel DVD Movie Factory is an example of DVD authoring software and all these types of software must also be able to burn the DVD as well as write the structure.

DVD Editing Software.
Many people search in the internet for this and probably get a little frustrated as to why they can not get a definitive result. The reason is that the term is not very precise in itself. It is unclear whether the person wishes to edit the structure of the DVD (menus, movie titles etc.) or whether they are seeking to edit the actual video.

In reality if you want to re-edit or manipulate the menus or features that are on a DVD and then burn to a new DVD that action would be covered by either a DVD copying or conversion software as mentioned above.

If what you want is to re-edit the actual video itself on a DVD then DVD software is not really designed to do that. This is leading more into the area of video editing software than DVD. Having said that there still is a range of DVD software suites that do include this function as an added feature. Roxio Creator 2009 and Nero 9 can both do this.

DVD Merging or Combining Software.
This one really suffers from the loose definitions of all of these functions. Most DVD copying software or conversion software offers the ability to take a couple of DVDs or more and have you re-combine the contents on to a newly created DVD. So you could say they merge or combine DVDs.

However there is another very specific action which is the merging of two, three or even four DVDs into one DVD but at the same time retaining the menus of the original DVDs. This is very often called for when a DVD camcorder is being used that records to 8cm DVDs.

People who re-use their 8cm RW DVDs or who wish to archive their recordings may want to transfer the contents of a few of those DVDs on to one full sized DVD and save some space. Just copying the files of the DVDs over to one full DVD would result in your losing the menus of the original DVDs. That would mean you would have hundreds of individual MPEG2 files on a disc and no way of knowing which one is which. Just a mass of MPEG2 symbols in a folder!

There seems to be only one software product available that can be truly described as DVD Merging software. It’s name is DVDRemake and it can merge or combine two, three or even four DVDs on to one without losing the original menus. Very handy for the DVD camcorder enthusiast.

Finally! DVD Disc Repair Software / DVD Data Error Correction.
As much as the manufacturers of DVDs, DVD burning software and DVD burners would have you believe that DVD is somehow perfect because it is digital that is very far from the truth. DVDs can be burned with errors, become scratched, or have “built in” errors because of bugs in the software being used or even the computer being used.

For such occurrences we have this category of DVD software. Generally speaking we are now getting down to some very specialised software that can correct existing errors in DVDs.

Often when you get these errors you see silly or meaningless alerts like “no disc” (even if you can see one!), “disc error” (well duh!), “invalid DVD navigation structure” (my personal favorite!) and a whole number of others. Without going into the myriad of available specialist software for this it is interesting to note that Nero 9 now has a module within it to handle a great number of these problems called RescueAgent.

So, that got a whole lot more complicated than I intended but I hope at least it will provide you with a general guide to the various functions of DVD software.