VSO ConvertXToDVD

Test Results

This new version comes with more options regarding encoding, so I have to make sure I do this right. Basically I will record the time taken to encode a source file to DVD. The writing section will not be included, this varies with media and writers used. In these tests I have used three test source files and set the target size to a normal DVD (4.5 GB), the CPU priority is set to normal and the speed indicators are averaged. For the specifications of the system and media used, you can have a look at the conclusion at the bottom of the page.

Something that has changed slightly from the previous version is the speed difference between the trial and registered version. With the previous version, the registered version seemed to have a slightly faster conversion speed than the trial version when tested on the same files. Now with this new encoding engine it doesn't make any difference. The only limitation is the "register now" screen that is transposed over your movie every other minute.

As you can see some movie types are faster to (re-)encode then others. Also noteworthy are the quality settings, you can see from the table above that it does matter, but the results are pretty close together that you could choose to leave the encoding quality on high, with a little slower encoding.

The total encoding time is very much down to the system specifications of the PC you use and the compression on the original file to be converted but you can expect to get an hour long movie encoded in about in 60 minutes if your system specifications are similar to the ones used in this review.

I did a test on a dual core system and disabled one core to check for a difference, but there was no notable difference. Also working in Windows XP x64 did not make a real difference. That means there's still room for improvement there.

Tip:

If you have two hard drives in your PC, use one for the source and one for the destination to help get those few extra frames per second and save on your encoding time.

Let’s see if these movies are compatible with some standard DVD-Players. For this test we used one standalone DVD player, one PC DVD playback device and the X-Box games console. This should give us a good idea of the compatibility of the recordings. Of course we have used a media that is known to be of good quality and checked it for any potential errors to rule out any media problems. Any issues in my opinion should be down to the software' recording engine. When played back on the tested playback devices no issues where noted and playback was smooth.