[plug] dvdrip

[Garry]

I'm playing with dvdrip on a Centrino 1.4Ghz laptop. It has a 40Gig HDD and 512Mb ram.

While I haven't really tried to make DVD player compatable svcd or vcd disks yet, one thing that has struck me is the reletive speed of DVDRIP compared to the equivalent Windows program. I use Divx5 on an AVI container with mp3 sound encoding. Mplayer plays the AVIs no drama.

A couple of different friends who have done this under windows report ripping times of ~18hrs. DVDRIP on Debian Unstable (dist-upgraded from Knoppix) does the HDD DVD dump in ~20mins, and then 2 runs at transcoding of 1.5hrs each. So the whole process takes ~3.5hrs..

Not having used the Windows programs to achieve the same result, I don't know the procedure with them, ie do they dump the .vob files on the HDD to speed the process? 

Anyone have experience with the windows programs? 

I'm trying to think if it is the file system efficiency (reiserfs), the HDD caching of the DVD contents or (least likely) the speed of the Centrino chip doing the conversion which is making the difference. 

Logic suggests that the windows programs can't be using hdd caching by default, but I don't know for sure if they can do this or not..

Be interested in other's thoughts..

Garry.