Ch3vr0n,
I really appreciate the effort you've taken to inform me. If you're willing to pursue this further...
The reason you cab shrink bd's at virtually no quality loss of bifold.
What's "bifold"?
1. Retail releases use bitrate MUCH HIGHER than it actually needs to be...
Sorry, I don't believe it.
2. The encoding engine used is extremely powerful and has a proven reputation.
I don't want to transcode the video. For example, ''The Bourne Identity'' is VC-1 encoded. I want the '/BDMV/STREAM/00010.m2ts' file in 'BOURNE_IDENT.iso' to also be VC-1 encoded.
X264 encoding engine first strips that excess bitrate ... discs here often have 4 or more audio tracks (English, French, German, Italian) that can take up to 10-15gb
Sorry, I don't believe there's any such thing as "excess bitrate". Also, stripping all the alternative language tracks and all the subtitles & captioning will save no more than 1 or 2 or maybe even 3 GBytes. Where you can shrink the content a lot is by stripping out the special features, but I don't want to do that, either.
What Anydvd does is told on the product page...
That's just marketing gobbledygook. There's nothing substantive in the product page. However, a fellow on the SlySoft Development Team named James told me that AnyDVD "is a filter driver for the optical drive class", so I assume that it's between the raw reader (ODD driver) and the decoder. That's what I thought it was. It's in the stream. It's something I could hook up with graphedit (that is, if AnyDVD had a graphedit module).
And of course anydvd HD works with bluray, that's the whole HD part. You get all functionality of anydvd (DVDs) with bluray capabilities and as a bonus hd-dvd support which is an obsolete format.
I understand that AnyDVD HD works with Blu-ray discs. My question is: Does
AnyDVD HD work with DVDs (or do I have to also buy
AndDVD)?) ...Oh, never mind. I'll eventually download
AnyDVD HD and discover its capabilities through experimentation.
Clonedvd can shrink DVDs from double layer size to single layer.
CloneBD does the same and more for bluray.
I'm not interested in shrinking, or transcoding, or stripping. I just want to back up DVDs & BDs.
Thanks so much for your help. I have a much better idea of the capabilities of AnyDVD HD now.
Ciao.