Why should anyone want to convert DVD to MP4? Everyone knows that DVD-s are the best. Everyone has a DVD player. What reason can one have for converting then?
The video DVD ushered in a new age of multimedia entertainment with its high-definition visuals, great audio tracks and convenient handling and storage. It is the most popular movie distribution medium in the world, and with good reason. But it is plastic-based medium, and this type of medium has one big problem. They aren’t long-lasting.
This may not be very apparent in the case of DVD-s yet, because they are a relatively new technology. But consider VCD-s. The material compositions of the VCD and the DVD are nearly identical, give or take a few layers. Now try to play a VCD that is more than five years old, and has not been preserved in a climate-controlled environment. Chances are, it’ll be scratched and pitted, and you’ll experience hiccups and stick-ups. The movie playing program may crash. Windows may freeze up on you if the CD drive stops responding. And the video data stored on the medium may have become lost forever.
You wouldn’t want the same to happen with your valuable DVD-s, would you? I mean some movies you just watch and then forget, but there are some that you watch again and again, and want to be watching more than five years from now. You can’t just keep them as DVD-s and assume they will be there whenever you need them.
If you dump DVD data to your hard drive, you’ll find it takes up several gigabytes of space. Even with today’s cheap and high-density HDD-s, you shall soon run out of real estate, after storing only a few titles. This is because DVD video is only lightly compressed. You need to use a different compression, something that retains quality but yet reduces the file size to less than what would fit on a single cdrom. And MP4 is the way to go for this. When you convert DVD to MP4, you’ll be able to store your entire collection on a hard drive and possibly still have space to spare.
