Product Reviews

DVDRemaster from Montreal-based Metakine is a utility that allows the recompression of dual-layer DVDs so they can fit onto single-layer, 4.7GB DVD discs.

One use for it is to protect your original investment. If a DVD you own becomes unplayable, there's usually no rescuing it. DVDRemaster Pro works with commercial DVDs so you could, if you were prepared to flout copyright, create backups of your movie collection. As well as this archiving function, DVDRemaster can recompress movies for iPod or Apple TV format.

To make a copy, you simply insert the DVD and tell DVDRemaster Pro that it's the source. You must then select a destination that will contain the remastered Video_TS folder. Once that's done, DVDRemaster Pro will burn the converted folder to a DVD. You can choose to set up burning before recompression so that the whole process takes place automatically (if you have two DVD drives). You can, alternatively, use Metakine's free FairMount utility to copy the source DVD's Video_TS folder to your hard drive, and set that as the source. This eliminates the need for two DVD drives.

You do, of course, get a few more options. One of the most useful is to make a film-only copy, stripping out all menus, extras, and language and subtitle tracks.

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This means you'll have less to recompress, so the resulting output should be a little better. Choosing Movie-only retains the chapter structure of the DVD, so you can still skip through chapters using your remote control; you just don't get the chapter menu. If you really want to customise your backup, you can use the Modify Program Chain option. This lets you choose exactly which extras or languages to leave in or out.

Two recompression modules are provided. Generally, you'll want to use the fast M2VRequantizer, which produces great results. However, if the original video is large (more than 7GB, say), you may want to use the M2VDownsizer, which recompresses everything. In use, we found the faster M2VRequantizer to be fine even on large DVDs. You can also set a target size for the compressed output. If you have a duallayer DVD, you can also choose to burn the Video_TS folder directly, although some newer DVDs may still require recompression, as they can be about 12GB in size. This is also useful if a previous burn has failed for any reason.

Another particularly useful feature is the ability to remaster a DVD for either video iPods or for Apple TV. However, since the iPod conversion only needs a single pass, the process can be performed directly from the DVD. Again, subtitles and language tracks can be selected. There are also several presets, including one that halves the frame rate and sets a resolution of 320 pixels to conserve hard disk space. Variable frame rates are available at all resolutions.

DVDRemaster worked well in our tests, but the documentation is poor and the task for which it is best suited - backing up your DVD collection - involves breaching copyright regulations. If you do have dual-layer discs that you want to compress to single-layer copies or transfer to an iPod, however, it does the job very well.