Vamps

High performance tool to transcode DVD videos to a smaller size

[ excerpt from developer’s www site with modifications ]

The idea was to use the high performance Metakine M2Requantiser to create a transcoder for Linux for shrinking the content of a DVD9. This would enable backups on cheap single layer DVDRs double layer burners weren’t even available that time.

Vamps builds a wrapper around the requantizer to extract the elementary MPEG2 video stream from the DVD’s program stream, feed it through the requantizer and finally re-pack it into the program stream again. Besides this, Vamps allows the selection of both audio and subtitle streams that should be copied into the output stream. This gives another small gain of disk space, since unwanted streams may be discarded.

Summed up, Vamps is only a very basic, but nevertheless essential tool to transcode DVD videos to a smaller size. Vamps does not need to write temporary data files, which is a major pro. Vamps is very fast. The downside is, that Vamps is not capable of making DVD backups on its own.