Thanks to the astounding audiovisual experience commercial Blu-ray movies present us, high definition Blu-rays do not belong to those dedicated videophiles only anymore, they are entering more and more common folks’ living rooms. Accompanying that, making backups of the Blu-rays is becoming an increasingly hard nut to crack. Reason is quite obvious: a feature-length Blu-ray movie normally contains around 35GB video and audio data, and this directly results in taking huge amount of time to rip them. Sometimes, you have to keep the backup process running overnight. However, even that does not guarantee a successful shot, as you might end up with a coaster in the morning. A real pain in the butt, huh?

Time to Kill That Pain in the Butt!

Pain Killer comes: After the homebrew .miniso File, Lightning-Recoding, BD Shrink, Cinavia Solution, and StealthyClone, DVDFab team recently rolls out another trump card, Lightning-Shrink Technology. Lightning-Shrink is DVDFab’s latest cutting-edge technology applied in DVDFab Blu-ray Copy and Blu-ray Ripper, and as far as Blu-ray decoding and recoding are involved. It takes the advantages of nVIDIA’s CUDA acceleration and Intel Quick Sync, to greatly decrease the time you spend on ripping or converting Blu-ray movies, to within one hour! In a word, if your computer is stronger enough, it’s time to say goodbye to the pain in the butt.

How to Define “Within One Hour”?

By “Within One Hour”, we mean the time it costs you while ripping a commercial Blu-ray movie off the real disc onto computer HDD as an ISO image file and with compression involved, or compressing an existing Blu-ray ISO image file on computer HDD into BD25 size. This said, cases like burning Blu-rays directly from original disc onto blank disc, burning existing Blu-ray ISO files or movie folders from computer HDD onto blank discs, and making a 1:1 bit-to-bit clone are not included, because we have to take into considerations of many uncertainty factors, namely, the reading and writing capability of various BD-ROM drives, the quality of different brands of blank BD discs, burning engines and preselected burning speed, etc. All these unpredictable elements could considerably prolong the backing up process, if not shorten.

Are There Any Special Requirements Regarding System Configuration?

Computers armed with 2^nd, 3^rd or 4^th generation Intel® Core™ processors, or housed with nVIADIA’s CUDA capable Graphics Cards, are able to apply DVDFab Lightning-Shrink technology, while backing up their Blu-rays in the specified cases.

Are There Any Other Limitations or Exceptions?

As said previously, DVDFab Lightning-Shrink technology can be applied only in DVDFab Blu-ray Copy and Blu-ray Ripper, paid versions of DVDFab 9, and only when decoding and recoding (compression) get involved.   There are some other limitations and exceptions, including:

• It does not support to directly render subtitles into videos;
• It does not support to output 3D videos for the time being;
• It does not support FPS conversion;
• It does not support deinterlaced videos;
• It does not support two pass encoding method;
• CUDA transcode supports h264, VC-1 and MPEG2 encoded Blu-rays;
• Intel Quick Sync transcode only supports h264 and MPEG2 Blu-rays;
• Both CUDA and Intel Quick Sync output h264 videos for now.

How Do I Enable DVDFab Lightning-Shrink?

Open Common Settings panel via the gear icon at the top right corner of DVDFab 9 newest version, navigate to General>A/V Codec, and then mark the option of “Enable Lightning-Shrink when applicable”. Next, click the “OK” button on that window and restart DVDFab 9 so that the settings shall take effect.

Comparison Table between IQS and IQS-based Lightning-Shrink:

Note: Based on our own tests, Intel Quick Sync outperforms nVIADIA CUDA quite a lot. And the time spent on the ripping or converting processes varies slightly according to the overall PC performances.