Review: Video Vault – Part 3: Transferring and Synchronizing Videos to a PVP and DMA

By Alexander Grundner | May 31st, 2005 (5) Comments

Well it’s about time we wrapped up the Video Vault review (view Part 1, Part 2). The reason why I took so long to get Part 3 of 3 posted was because, after talking to the developer, I found out that Video Vault had more tricks up its sleeve than I initially thought. Plus, a friend tipped me off to a Windows XP background DVD copy-protection stripping script called DVD43 (aka DVD For Free) that eases the process of importing DVDs to Video Vault or any other DVD management/ripping/burning application. Note: eHomeUpgrade does not condone or encourage use of such circumvention tools, which by the way, have been found illegal in U.S. court rulings.

Now for the features I missed in “Part 2: Burning and Transcoding Videos” that will definitely be of interest to people considering buying the product. One of the big functions I missed (but in my defense wasn’t completely apparent) was that when you import DVDs into Video Vault you can chose a variety of other formats in the “IMPORT DISC” pane besides “Standard DVD” – the default MPEG with AC3 audio setting. In fact, Video Vault gives users several options:

* Users can create a parent movie folder and import DVDs at the highest quality settings by selecting “Standard DVD” or “DivX DVD.” Most users will probably choose to go this route because you’ll have a master video file to work from when exporting video to other devices. Note: I found that videos brought in with “Stantard DVD” settings did NOT playback on the D-Link Media Lounge and probably any other media adapter that does not support AC3 audio. FYI – The latest version of Video Vault added a video shrink feature (it’s like having DVD Shrink built-in) so users can fit a movie onto a standard DVD.

* The other option users have is to create sub-folders for their target device(s) and then import DVDs with the appropriate settings. Once videos are imported in, users can quickly and easily export files from the sub-folders to the intended devices in minutes instead of hours.

* The third option is to do both the import and export at the same time. For example, I connected the Samsung Portable Media Center before launching the application, which Video Vault recognized after it loaded, and I was able to import a DVD movie directly into the handheld.

Lastly, I found, after playing with both Dr. DivX (the defacto DivX video conversion tool) and Video Vault (a licensed DivX product), that Video Vault did a better job at importing DVDs, as well as, detecting its different audio settings, including audio with sub-titles. From what I read on the DivX forums, Dr. DivX can’t encode VOB files with sub-titles, but don’t quote me. The downside to Video Vault, in regard to DivX, is that the quality of the “DivX DVD” video was noticeably inferior to a DivX Certified Home Theater Video. My guess, since it only takes Video Vault 2.5 hours to encode a DivX video, while Dr. DivX takes twice that to convert a DVD to a DivX Certified Home Theater Video, it’s obvious that Video Vault only does a single pass encode while Dr. DivX by default does a double pass (hence twice the time).

Hopefully you found the above information useful. Now, lets jump to what Part 3 of this review is all about: transferring and synchronizing videos to a Samsung Portable Media Center and a D-Link Media Lounge.

Transferring Video to a Samsung Portable Media Center: (10 out of 10)
Transferring videos to a portable video player (in this case a Microsoft-based Portable Media Center) is drop dead simple. Just choose “EXPORT TO PVP” and check off the movie(s) you’re interested in exporting and select your video quality settings. The great thing about Video Vault, if you have a PVP connected to your PC, is that the program will auto-detect the PVP you’re using and provide the correct screen dimensions and acceptable video formats. Since I’m using a Samsung PMC YH-999, Video Vault prescribes:

[Size / Video / Audio]
320×240 / WMV 800kbps / WMA (slower encoding / highest quality)
320×240 / WMV 600kbps / WMA (faster encoding / medium quality)
320×240 / WMV 500kbps / WMA (fastest encoding / lower quality)

Although I tried all three settings, I would recommend sticking with the lower quality setting because it creates acceptable looking, smooth playing video with a small footprint. On top of that, it takes less time to encode and transfer to your device. If you’re a little impatient like me, that’s a good thing. For fun, I decided to compare the transcoding ability of both Video Vault and Windows Media Player 10 – since most people who own a PMC probably are used to using WMP 10 to sync videos. Here are the results:

Source:
Spider-Man / 4.3GB / 02:01:13 / MPEG-2 30fps / English Dolby Digital 5.1

Output:
Video Vault
320×240 / WMV 500kbps / WMA
Completed in 49 minutes – 468.62MB

WMP 10
320×240 / WMV ???kbps / WMA (WMP 10 does not specify or allow you to change WMV kbps)
Completed in 33 minutes – 498.84MB

Impressions:
I thought both videos looked and sounded identical. Being the case, I’d rather use Video Vault for its small video file size output, not to mention it gives me the flexibility to choose higher quality video settings if I desire to use them.

* FYI – The latest version of Video Vault supports PlayStation Portable (PSP)

Syncing Video to a D-Link Media Lounge: (10 out of 10)
If I have to judge how the program interacts with the D-Link Media Lounge, I have to give it flying colors for being able to automatically update Media Lounge’s video database/media server every time a new movie is added to Video Vault. This saves users the extra step of having to launch the D-Link Media Server application to refresh its database when a new video has been added to the PC.

In addition, if you know you’ll be using Media Lounge as your primary video playback device, Video Vault gives you video import options that are optimized for the device (Note: Media Lounge can’t playback AC3 audio encode video files, so pass on importing videos using the “Standard DVD” setting). In fact, Video Vault has optimized video import settings for MediaMVP and Media Center Edition 2005.

Side Note: I got better DivX and MPEG-2 with AC3 audio file playback support using the Play@TV media adapter – no compatibility issues, unlike Media Lounge which sometimes choked on video files I had stored on my hard drive (most notably DivX Certified Home Theater and High Definition video).

Conclusion:
I can’t recommend Video Vault enough. It blows away all the competing products I’ve seen to date. But I have a wish list of features I would like to see that would put this application over the top:

1. DivX High-Def and Home Theater “Certified” video encoding/import feature
2. The ability to add current videos to Video Vault’s database without having to re-encode them as part of the import process
3. The ability to export to a Video CD (VCD) and DivX CD
4. Option to strip out the vertical black bars from 16:9 DVD movies

Other than that… no complaints. Overall rating (8.93 out of 10)

Jump to:
Part 1: Software Installation, Archiving, and Managing Videos
Part 2: Burning and Transcoding Videos

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

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