14 DAY TRIAL // As if the movie studios from Hollywood didn't have enough reasons to worry about the pirating and cracking of DVD protection codes, now that RatDVD, an application aimed at video compressing, has been released, they have yet another one.
The solution was developed by students from the Aarhus (Denmark) and St. Petersburg (Russia) universities, and from their statements it seems that the entire content of data from a DVD (the actual movie, bonuses, comments and subtitled versions) can be compressed into a single file.
In other words, the XviD and DivX have all the reasons to be afraid, despite the fact that both of them offer qualities close to the one of the original DVD and a compression ratio high enough to fit the content on a CD. The only problem is that you have to settle just with the movie, without bonuses or other goodies from the DVD.
The files created by this program have the extension .ratDVD and can be read afterwards directly from the PC with any DVD player or can be burned on a DVD. Although the main purpose of the application seems to be related to the pirating of legally distributed movies, there is also a legal usage of the RatDVD. This solution can be used to make backups of legally bought DVDs, provided that the copies are not distributed to others.