MPEG-2, like JPEG is already compressed, so the likes of WinRAR and WinZIP make very little difference to the overal size of a disc. The only possible way this could work is my transcoding the file to another format, or by compressing the mpeg frames again like ReMPEG does.
And here is the part of his FAQ where he talks about his magic codec:
Are there any more details about the Video codec you are using?
RatDVD uses a video codec called XEB. This codec is the result from an experimental project I did with some fellows and that does not use any XviD, x.264, etc. code although by the very nature of it contains routines which is similar in function and even to a small extend in output to what you’ll find out there – obviously I didn’t reinvent video-encoding. Since I have been asked here is a small summary of the codec internals:
* It is block based (No wavelets anywhere)
* It has a dynamic GOP structure, P frames have only one reference frame, B frames two.
* GOPs are significantly longer than normal DVD GOPs and always closed
* To avoid drift in long GOPs it has a build-in intra-refresh mechanism
* It has intra prediction significantly more advanced than MPEG2, but not quite as flexible as H.264
* It uses an integer transformation that approximates DCT
* It uses a piecewise linear adaptive quant. The Quant level is determined for each macroblock by a simple psycho visual model
* It has a primitive in-loop deblocking filter
* Mode decision is part lagrangian optimization, part ad hoc based on statistics manually tuned to fit.
* It uses an in-codec scaler and the actual encoded picture size can vary in both dimensions between GOPs
* In order to maintain navigation ability and the reconvertability the codec suffers some limitations that others don’t
* The MUX format is H.262 + some private extensions
The main reason for this codec was the ability to transport the complete DVD navigation data to be able to recreate the original DVDs. Now that this goal is reached I can look in more detail at the performance and quality optimizations since I believe that there is still a lot more potential.
Someone has been trying Jedi mind tricks on you, haven't they?
