Review: Video Vault – Part 2: Burning and Transcoding Videos

By Alexander Grundner | May 1st, 2005 (0) Comments

Hopefully you’ve gotten a chance to read part one of our three part review on X Software’s Video Vault 2.0. Now in part two we’ll be taking a closer look at the software’s burning and transcoding capabilities. Like many, you are probably interested in archiving your DVD movies, but what about those occasions when you want to burn a hard copy or transcode the movie to a different video codec or size format? Usually you would need to buy two separate programs to handle each chore, but Video Vault enables users to burn their archived movies to a Standard DVD or Dual-Layer DVD (only if you have a dual-layer DVD burner installed), as well as, creating a DivX DVD to playback on DivX compatible DVD set-tops.

Burning DVDs: (8.5 out of 10)
Step 1: Click the EXPORT TO DVD button on the left sidebar
Step 2: Select the check box of the movie (or multiple stored video clips) you wish to burn
Step 3: Select the format – Standard DVD or DivX DVD
Step 4: Either leave the default video and audio setting or customize them to your needs
Step 5: Press START

Note: One thing you should know though… if you import a movie into the Vault at its original file size, you can only burn the movie to a dual layer DVD. However, if you shrink the movie down, say with DVDShrink, you can burn a single movie to a standard 4.7GB DVD. Be warned… if you wish to burn a movie in the DivX format, Video Vault has to transcode the movie from MPEG to DivX, which can take anywhere from 2 hours to 15 hours depending on the size of the movie and the speed of your CPU.

Thoughts on the DVD process: Video Vault’s export/burning tool works brilliantly for quick and simple hard copies of your archived movies (you can even burn multiple short MPEG video clips to make a chaptered DVD of your home movies). However, if you want to convert several of your movies to DivX and then burn them to a single DVD, it would probably be easier to use the program’s EXPORT TO FILE function (which will be covered next) and then burn all the files using Window’s XP burning tool or some other 3rd party application. It would have also been nice to burn directly to a CD to create Video CDs (VCD) – perhaps in a future version.

Transcoding Movies: (9 out of 10)
Transcoding movies worked as advertised. Just click on EXPORT TO FILE, select the movie you wish to export, pick the SIZE / VIDEO / AUDIO settings that best suits your needs, and click START. It’s actually pretty amazing to see how easy it is to convert your archived movies to MPEG-2, DivX, or WMV. What’s more, Video Vault has dozens of pre-configured optimized settings to choose from (27 in total: 6 MPEG-2 settings, 6 DivX settings, and 15 WMV settings) – perfect for the non-techie, but versatile enough for the enthusiast. One draw back, though, there’s no way for users to modify the settings. However, after playing around with the different setting formats, I found that the quality of the transcoded movies were excellent, especially when sticking with the higher-quality choices (FYI – DivX movies looked and sounded great too).

SIZE / VIDEO / AUDIO Setting Ranges:
MPEG-2
Highest: 720×480 / 6mbps / Original (AC3)
Lowest: 352×240 / 1mbps / Original (AC3)

DivX
Highest: 720×480 / DivX / MP3
Lowest: 176×128 / DivX / MP3

WMV
Highest:720×480 / WMV 6mbps / WMA
Lowest: 320×240 / WMV 250kbps / WMA

Overall I’ve got to give the developers credit for making burning and transcoding videos drop dead simple. It’s apparent they put a lot of time into providing commonly used optimized settings, thus taking out the guess work out for the novice user. With that said there’s still room for improvement: something simple like “Best,” “Fair,” “Low,” quality setting hints in the drop down menu would make choosing a format even easier. And as previously mentioned, a way to customize or set your own settings would also be beneficial. Oh, and something that just came to mind… Video Vault is probably the easiest way to export your DVD movies to DivX (dare I say easier than Dr. DivX? — OK, it’s a tie).

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That concludes Part 2 of 3 of the review. Stay tuned for Part 3 where I’ll be transferring and synchronizing videos to a Samsung Portable Media Center and a D-Link Media Lounge.

Jump to:
Part 1: Software Installation, Archiving, and Managing Videos
Part 3: Transferring and Synchronizing Videos to a PVP and DMA

* Ratings are based on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the highest and 5 being average.

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