

Is anyone aware of a formatting utility that will format in older versions of UDF? Indeed, I've read that your only real hope of success is to format the drive in version 1.02 of UDF. I thought I had a solution in UDF, but Windows 7 can only format in UDF version 2.0, which I've learned is likely way too recent for TVs to read. Given that FAT32 limits file sizes to 4GB, how can I plug in a USB drive to my TV and watch +4GB MP4 movies that way? The TV won't recognise any of the extended file systems (NTFS, exFAT). So now that I am an unstoppable DVD -> MP4 machine, the last hurdle has presented itself. The 4GB file size limit is a FAT32 one, not an XP one. It's actually faster that way and I think it saves wear and tear on the drive too. Then you can do the encoding, which does use a lot of cpu, from the hard drive. So it's good to just use the drive for the decrypting part, since that doesn't take much cpu. iso with imgburn in either takes the same amount of time. One is about 3 times faster than the other. They're definitely the slowest thing in your machine.

Using one program to both rip and encode sounds good, but I've found that using dvdfab decrypter followed by handbrake is actually faster. Given the inherent complexity of video encoding and the lack of consistent standards, that's hard to do. I think it has the best balance between power and ease of use. As mentioned, it's really the same encoder with different interfaces. The encoder part ( DVDFab) is trialware and it's not as good really. Good program (it supports separate chapters) but it won't work with many newer discs. DVD Decrypter hasn't been updated since 2005.
