CloneDVD 2 review
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Posted on Wednesday 14th of April, 2004 at 14:16 by Blade
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As we did a review on version 1 of Elby's CloneDVD, it is now time to take a look at the new version 2 so we can have a look at what has changed.
We got a serial of Elby to take the new Clone DVD for a test spin; we wanted to test Clone DVD v2.x with Walt Disney Pictures “Finding Nemo”, since the Disney Films are usually harder to clone.
About the Software:
According to the makers, Elaborate Bytes:
CloneDVD is a program to transcode a movie or record any DVD Video project on your hard drive to DVD. CloneDVD is not a DVD ripper and cannot bypass CSS encrypted DVDs,
for this you can use programs like DVD Decryptor, etc. also lately more and more DVDs don’t have any protection anymore.
Experience top quality home theatre! CloneDVD extracts transcodes and writes any original DVD title you like to a single recordable DVD (or split it up in 2 or more DVDs). The speed of the program impresses also the amazing image quality of the movie copy. A special transcoding technology compresses your choice of DVD title with your selected audio and subtitle streams to one DVD Recordable. A Video Preview plays an overview of all selectable DVD titles. CloneDVD is very easy to use.
Installation:

Installing Clone DVD is nice and simple, using the standard Clone DVD Installer. A few clicks and installation is complete.
Additionally to CloneDVD 2 Elby provides a free download of Virtual CloneDrive, which will also be included in the future box version. Virtual CloneDrive works and behaves just like a physical DVD drive, although it only exists virtually. Image files generated with CloneDVD can be “inserted” into the virtual drive from your harddisk or from a network drive and thus be used like a normal DVD.
Which is a nice extra feature, it works similair to Deamon Tools, and others.
Usage:

Clone DVD 2 uses a different type of interface, using a rolling film display rather than the usual wizard style interface, which also allows insertion of custom animations.
In the main screen you can decide what to do like Copy DVD Titles, Clone DVD or Write Existing Data:
COPY DVD TITLES:

This allows you to add one or more titles from a DVD to your DVD Backup, Including either preserving or removing the original menus if so required by the user.
CLONEDVD:

The main CloneDVD mode, here you clone a DVD from your harddrive and make it fit onto a standard DVD 5 disc or custom size which makes Clone DVD prepared for the dual layer DVD Recorders, for now Clone DVD support maximal DVD size of 9999 MB.

You also have the option to select which audio and subtitle streams you want to keep on your backup DVD. Once you have decided which titles/audio, and subtitles you wish to keep, then you come to the DVD burning screen.

Here you can choose not to delete the created DVD files after burning. This is very handy if indeed you want to edit these files later to bypass trailers at the beginning of a film and go straight to the main menu. Clone DVD does not include this function.
WRITE EXISTING FILES:

This screen allows the user to write to DVD, either a set of Vob/Ifo files or an ISO/UDF image to DVD. This is handy if you have already created an ISO with a DVD ripping software such as DVDDecrypter of ImG Tools, and for some reason, that software does not write properly. You can also choose a volume label here too.
Also one of the new features in Clone DVD is to split the DVD in 2 or more parts, the only pity thing is that this is not so clear how to use it especially for end users who are doing.
Such things for the very first time for those we would advise read the online manual one time about how to get it done.
Clone DVD compared to DVD Shrink:
For the speed test between Clone DVD and DVD Shrink we will transcode only the movie, with one language audio.
We will not include many pictures of DVD shrink since this is a CloneDVD review and not a DVD Shrink Review.
So first select the movie of the DVD, since we wanted to transcode this only.

Now remove the audio which we did not want to use for the test.

We left all the subtitles, since those normally take 5 MB to 8 MB max, per subtitle.
Now let’s go to general overview window before we start transcoding.

Just Press go and it will start transcoding the movie only.

The transcoding took 5 minutes and 23 Seconds as you can see in the screenshot above.
Now let’s compare how fast DVD shrink does the same project.

As you can see DVD Shrink is 13 Seconds faster on the exact same project.
Now this was of course a very low shrink so we decided to also include a test were we make a back-up of the full DVD, except we removed the DTS audio to keep the quality better.

Total transcoding time was 15 minutes and 51 seconds with a quality of 57%, lets see how long DVD Shrink takes to do the same job.

Well as you can see DVD shrink does the same job with 0.5 less quality than CloneDVD.

With the full DVD project Clone DVD was a bit faster than DVD Shrink, DVD Shrink took 18 minutes and 37 seconds for the same transcoding project.

Conclusion:
On most fronts this program is quite user friendly but certain things are less user friendly, and could be improved by Elby. Especially the splitting part is not so easy.
Besides this, it did not work well with multi camera position DVDs, but on the DVDs which don’t have this feature it works fine. For the rest it is a great program and it is faster then DVD shrink. One of CloneDVD's big advantages is that you can set it up in your own language. The most common languages are supported by CloneDVD.
The DVD quality is the same as other programs like DVD Shrink. What we personally thought that was a pity, was that there is no support for DVD43 which removes the region protection and de-CSSes the DVD. For this we had to use a program like DVD Decryptor to rip the movie files from the DVD to the Harddisk first.
CloneDVD has some small items which could be improved but for the rest it is a fine tool to have, with excellent speed.
Pros And Cons:
Pros:
30 day fully functional trial!
Nice User Interface
Gives accurate file size
Great quality
Plenty of options
Great help file
Guaranteed excellent support
Multilanguage support
Cons:
It crashed once in the middle of transcoding the movie
Not completely user friendly for beginners. We would advise newbies to read the manual first.
The Splitting DVD option is a bit hidden, and it doesn’t work well with multi angle DVDs
Pricing and Availability:
Available now, Clone DVD 2 is priced at 46 Euro for the boxed edition and 39 Euro for the web download (Orders from the European Union include 16% Sales Tax.).
Tested on:
Intel 2,8GHz Prescott
EPoX 4PDA5+
1GB PC3200 DDR RAM
Windows XP Professional UK
Nec 1300A DVD writer
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