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Rip DVDs for Playback on Your iPhone, PSP, Xbox 360, PS3, AppleTV, or Any H.264-Enabled Player

Will Smith — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 12:00:00 -0600

It’s hard to believe in the iTunes era of blink-and-you-miss-them CD rips, but in the mid-90s, ripping a CD was a time-consuming process, fraught with peril. Ripping a single disc to 128kbps MP3 could take 8 hours on a 200MHz Pentium! Fast forward a decade, with faster hardware and better software and CD ripping is so mainstream your mom does it.

Ripping DVDs and transcoding the video stored within into more efficient formats involves an order of magnitude more scary math than ripping audio CDs. A machine that will rip the latest Miley Cyrus CD in moments could take hours to extract and convert your copy of AVP to an iPod-friendly format. However, with the right software, a quad-core equipped PC, and a little know-how, you can cut your disc rip time from hours to 20 or 30 minutes. There are still plenty of tricks and traps for first-time rippers, but we’ll show you the basics, then walk you through the secrets of ripping power users everywhere.

However, the first thing you need to decide is simple: what player are you ripping your discs for? Are you ripping for a portable player, like the PSP or iPhone? Would you rather stream to device in your living room, like the Xbox 360, PS3, or Popcorn Hour? Are you simply interested in making an archival-quality DVD rips, in case you lose your collection? More likely, you’re probably looking for a combination of all three of these things. We’ll show you how to rip your DVD to a file suitable for streaming that consumes a fraction of the disk space of a DVD but maintains full video and audio quality. Then you can take that file, and convert it for whatever other devices you might have, like a PSP or an iPod. For the purposes of this story, we're going to focus on DVD rips. Getting ahold of unencrypted high-defintion video legally is still pretty tricky. We'll update with Blu-ray ripping info as ripping Blu-ray gets easier.

With the preliminaries out of the way, let’s get started.

Determining Your Target Player

There are several different factors that determine the compatibility of your ripped video files. The resolution of the video, the video and audio codecs, the container format used, and even more esoteric things like the framerate can affect whether your video will work on your device of choice. If you just rip discs as you need the content and then delete files afterward, simply rip to the target of choice. However, if you want to build an archive of ripped movies, we recommend that you use open, widely-supported codecs and containers at the native resolution of the DVD, and then transcode the files as you need them to lower resolutions and bitrates. Naturally, we’ll show you how to do both.

Your player selection also impacts your choices when it comes to audio tracks and subtitle support. While the most common container formats, mp4 and mkv, support multiple track and subtitle streams in one file, few players will work with multiple audio tracks, and an even smaller subset will work with subtitles. That means you need to rip a single audio track—typically the main movie’s English soundtrack—and burn the subtitles into the video, rather than leave them as separate streams inside the container.

Bitrate is a little trickier. Most hardware players will handle whatever bitrate you select, especially if they're designed for high-definition playback. Both consoles and the AppleTV support high-definintion files, so they're more than capable of playing DVD-resolution video at whatever bitrate you choose. However, the higher a bitrate you choose, the larger the file will be. From our testing, we found the sweet spot for most movies to be around 2000kbps average, but we cranked it up to 2500kbps for movies with a lot of action. If your hardware supports high-profile H.264 (Xbox 360, PS3, and the Apple TV do, but many portable players don't), you can get away with a lower bitrate. With 1.5TB hard drives available for about $180 now, we'd rather rip at a too-high bitrate to ensure maximum quality video than save a few hundred MB of disk space.

We typically recommend ripping to the MP4 container, it’s widely supported on both streaming devices and portables. Furthermore, the tools for manipulating the streams within the file are established and easy to use, which makes it easy to transcode your video to a less supported format for a specific player.

A Word About Subtitles

Typically, DVDs include multiple subtitle streams that serve different purposes. Nearly every DVD has some English subtitles, even non-foreign language movies. It’s important that you understand the difference between subtitles and closed captions. Subtitles are simply the dialog from the movie written across the bottom of the screen. Closed captions include subtitles, but they also include audio cues that help people with impaired hearing enjoy the movie fully.

While closed captions are present on almost every disc, many English-language movies also use subtitles to show what a character speaking a foreign language is saying. On some discs, these subtitles will be hidden in a separate stream, while in others, they’ll be mixed in with the closed-captions, but marked so that the DVD player only shows the proper captions. Regardless, it’s crucial that you get the proper subtitles for all the films you rip. Otherwise, you’ll never know what Jabba or Greedo are saying in Star Wars, and watching a long expository scene in another language without the benefit of subtitles sucks.

In practice, the first English subtitle track is typically the one that includes subtitles and forced or otherwise, while the second subtitle track is the one that includes closed captions.

Bypassing Copy Protection

The first thing you’ll need to do when ripping a DVD is remove the copy protection. Most discs use a variant of the Content Scrambling System (CSS), but many also use other techniques to make it more difficult to extract the video from the disc. Although DVD ripping apps, like HandBrake and AutoMKV aren’t updated as frequently as new copy protection schemes come out, there are a pair of utilities that are dedicated to stripping copy protection—AnyDVD (€49, www.slysoft.com) and DVD43 (free, www.dvd43.com).

Both apps do a fine job, although AnyDVD justifies its high price by bypassing new forms of encryption extremely quickly after they appear. Both of these apps serve as on-the-fly disc decrypters, stripping copy protection before your ripping utility or playback software even knows the disc is present. Want to rip an unencrypted disc to hard drive? It’s as easy as copying the contents of the disc’s VIDEO_TS file to your hard drive once you’ve installed AnyDVD or DVD43. Regardless, before we continue, you should install one or the other of these apps. AnyDVD is free to try for 30 days, while DVD43 is always free.

Ripping Your First Disc

For simple, high-quality rips of any kind of content, it’s tough to beat Handbrake. We like Handbrake for a few reasons—its built-in presets make it very easy for anyone to use, it does a good job of detecting the proper video, audio, and subtitle selections, and it has never failed to successfully rip a DVD, and we’ve ripped hundreds of discs.

To rip your first disc, drop it in your drive and click the Source button in the top-left corner of the Handbrake window. If you’re using AnyDVD or DVD43, you can safely ignore the prompt asking for the location of VLC. If you aren’t, you’ll need to download VLC. Unless you have multiple optical drives, the disc in your DVD-ROM should be one of the listed options. If it’s not, select the choose a folder option and navigate to your optical drive. Handbrake will take a minute or two to scan the contents of your disc, and will do its best to determine the appropriate titles and chapters on the disc. Handbrake’s generally spot on for movie DVDs, although you’ll probably need to manually select the proper chapters and titles for discs that contain TV shows (more on ripping TV shows here).

After Handbrake’s familiarized itself with your disc, you need to select the proper output preset. For streaming to or playback on, the Apple Universal preset is terrific. It looks great, and works great on the iPhone, newer iPod Classics, and the Apple TV. For streaming to the PS3, Xbox 360, or pretty much anything else, we typically recommend a modified PS3 preset. If you don't care about the details, you can just choose Handbrake's default PS3 preset, which uses the H.264 video codec to encode your disc’s video at its native resolution using 2500kbps variable bitrate that’s also compatible with the Xbox 360. It automatically downmixes your disc’s 5.1 audio to a 2.0 Dolby ProLogic II stream.

Once you've selected a preset, make sure that both the two-pass encode and the turbo first pass options are checked on the video tab. Then flip to the Audio/Subtitles tab and ensure the proper subtitle and audio selections are checked. If the movie includes some subtitles, you should select the first English subtitle track and check the Forced Subtitles Only box. If you’re not sure, it’s best to go ahead and check it. Don’t worry, if the disc is mastered properly and there are no subtitles, it won’t affect your rip at all. Once you’re happy with your settings, you can press the + button in the preset window to save your profile (we recommend giving it a different default name than the others). Unfortunately, caption settings aren’t saved in presets, so you have to manually set them each time you rip another disc.

Before you can start the encode, you need to tell Handbrake where to save the finished rip and what to call it. You can save the resulting file anywhere on your hard drive. Once you’ve done that, press the Start button, and your encode will start. Depending on the number of cores you have and the speed of your processor, encoding could take anywhere from 40 minutes to several hours.

Ripping Multiple DVDs at Once

Because the transcoding process takes a lot of time and monopolizes your CPU, it’s helpful to queue up several discs to be transcoded at a time when you’re not using your PC. You can do this by copying the full DVDs to your hard disk and then queuing several movies in Handbrake to transcode one after the other.

If you’re using AnyDVD, you can start the DVD ripping tool by right clicking the tray icon and selecting rip DVD to hard disk. Tell the app where to save the disc’s contents and click copy. You can do this for as many discs as you have hard disk space to hold. Then open Handbrake and click the source button. Point the app to the folder that you copied your discs to, and select the first one. Instead of selecting Start when you’ve selected the proper profile and tweaked your audio and subtitle settings, click Add to Queue. Repeat this for each disc you’ve copied to your hard drive, and press Encode when you’re ready to start transcoding.

Ripping TV Show DVDs

Ripping TV shows is a little trickier than ripping a single large movie, but it’s similar to the procedure we just outlined for queuing multiple discs. Different studios use different techniques, but the basic idea is the same. First you need to load your DVD in Handbrake. Then, find the individual episodes in Handbrake’s source section. The easiest way to to find episodes is to look at the playtime for each chapter or title. Typically 30 minute TV shows are around 23 minutes and hour-long shows are about 46 minutes. Once your settings are right and you’ve found the right titles, you can add each individual episode to the queue. Make sure you assign each one a unique name, or Handbrake will overwrite the old episodes as you rip new ones. After the episodes have been ripped, you’ll need to make sure that each one is properly named, frequently the first title on the disc isn’t the first one that’s listed in the menus.

Converting Your Ripped Files to Another Format

By now you should have quite a few movies and TV shows ripped in a high-quality archival format. However, many devices won’t play videos encoded at this resolution or bitrate. Lucky for us, Handbrake makes it easy to convert videos to other formats. All you need to do is load the video you want to convert using the Source menu, and then choose the appropriate preset or output settings for your player and transcoded away. You can even queue multiple files for conversion.

Playback and Streaming

Now that you’ve ripped your DVD collection, how do you stream the videos into your living room? The easy way to stream MP4 files to your Xbox is to install the Zune Marketplace software, which you can download at Zune.net (whether you own a Zune or not). Once you add the videos to the Zune software and enable sharing, you’ll be able to open them using any Xbox 360 on your home network.

If you want to stream to a PlayStation 3, it’s a little more complex. Fortunately, we have a how-to that explains exactly how to use TVersity to stream video from your PC to your PS3, Xbox 360, or any other UPNP-enabled device. It can be a little tricky to get TVersity running properly, especially if you’ve installed a ton of codecs on your system.

We’ve also heard great things about PacketVideo (formerly known as TwonkyMedia). We haven’t tested Twonky since the 4.4 version came out, but it has strong reviews from the community and might be worth trying out. It offers many features that are comparable to TVersity, and is reportedly easier to install and run to boot. If you’ve had trouble getting codecs working with TVersity in the past, PacketVideo is a great option.

If you just want to watch the videos on your PC, there are lots of options. If you have a recent version of WinDVD or PowerDVD, either of those apps should play the videos with hardware acceleration to boot. A good free alternative is VLC, which should play pretty much any video file you throw at it.Or, if you don't mind fiddling with lots of codec incompatibilities, you can install one of the codec packs that float around the Internet, like CCCP, and play your movies in Windows Media Player or Media Player Classic.

Now go enjoy your movie library!

GPU-Based Video Encoding is Here: Does That Mean Curtains For Your CPU?

Will Smith — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 11:01:00 -0500

Earlier this summer, both Nvidia and ATI hosted press events to unveil their new hardware—and the excitement about GPU-based encoding was palpable. We were promised that our videocards would make Photoshop faster and better and our GPUs would encode video 10 times faster than our CPUs. In fact, someone lacking tech savvy would have left these presentations thinking, "Wow, these GPU things can make common computing tasks run insanely fast, and there are a couple of games that work with them too." Of course, as is typical, the truly big promises (like 10x faster video encodes) were off in the future, when the software was "ready."  

Well, the software's nearly ready. Elemental's Badaboom uses Nvidia's CUDA interface to do lots of the grunt work of DVD ripping by using the GPU instead of your musty old CPU. I've been in the Lab for the last few days putting this app through the ringer. Our test bed for this challenge is an Intel Q6600 quad core, running at a stock 2.4GHz, with 4GB of memory and a GeForce GTX 280 reference board.  

The short, short version, for anyone who wants to skip ahead, is that Badaboom is an extremely promising first-generation utility, and there's a lot to like. However, there are some serious problems for anyone looking to replace Handbrake (www.handbrake.fr) or AutoMKV (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=134478) for their archival DVD rips.   

To properly evaluate Badaboom, we compared its speed and video quality to Handbrake’s, which is essentially a GUI front end for a tweaked version of the CPU-powered X264 encoder. Unfortunately, we quickly discovered a hitch: Badaboom isn't capable of running H.264’s maximum quality settings, as Handbrake is. By default, Handbrake uses the H.264 high profile, while Badaboom uses the lower-quality baseline profile. To see how both apps performed in an apples-to-apples scenario, we ripped a copy of Pee-Wee's Big Adventure to our hard drive and then ripped it to H.264 with each app, using a variety of settings. Here's our test matrix:

Settings for Test Runs

	Elemental Badaboom Beta 2	Handbrake 0.9.2
Test #1: PS3 Stock Settings	upscales to 1280x720 (?!), 2500 kbits/sec, default settings	PS3 Stock settings, Single-pass, 720x480 resolution
Baseline Settings	PS3 preset, 2100kbit/s	2100kbit/sec, single pass, Handbrake using baseline settings(see end of article)
"Best" Quality	Custom Media Center Preset - 2500kbit/s	Deux Six Quatre preset - 2500kbit/s
iPhone	1500 kbit/s, preset settings	1500kbit/s, preset settings

PS3 Stock Settings

When using two different codecs, even when you're encoding the same content, it's extremely difficult to ensure that you're actually measuring similar workloads. As a case in point, examine the first test we ran, the PS3 stock settings. We chose the PS3 profile because video ripped for the PS3 will also work on many other devices, and includes options that are commonly used while ripping.

While Handbrake ripped the DVD video at native resolution using the PS3 preset, the default Badaboom PS3 profile ripped the disc using the H.264 baseline preset and then upscaled it to 1280x720. The two apps showed remarkably similar results, separated by about 3 minutes on a 40-minute rip, but the quality of the Handbrake encode was vastly superior, despite the higher resolution of Badaboom's output. When we ran the test again, without forcing Badaboom to upscale the video, our results strongly favored Badaboom. However, since Handbrake runs a High profile H.264 encode by default, we wanted to see how the GPU stacked up against the CPU when the workloads were more equal. (Be sure to click through to see the native-resolution, losslessly-compressed image. There are additional quality comparison images on the final page of the story.)

PS3 Stock Settings: When we stopped Badaboom from upscaling the video to 720p from DVD resolution, we saw a substantial speed boost for the GPU-accelerated app. However, Handbrake was encoding using the much more strenuous High H.264 profile. (click image for full-size)

TEST #1: PS3 STOCK SETTINGS

	Elemental BadaBoom (PS3 preset, 2500bits/sec, 720p)	Elemental BadaBoom (baseline, PS3 preset, 2500bits/sec, 480p)	Handbrake .9.2 PS3 (high profile, 2500bits/sec, 480p)
PeeWeeMark (sec)	2256	1097	2460
File Size (gb)	1.56	1.53	1.7

Test #2: Baseline Settings

That's when we went to the video codec experts at Doom9.org and asked how to configure Handbrake to do a fair encoding test, in order to most effectively mimic the settings that Badaboom uses in Handbrake's X264 codec. After a few misfires, we settled on a fair baseline that uses roughly the same features and results in roughly the same image quality as Badaboom (The full settings are listed at the end of the article if you want to see the specific X264 options we used). We were surprised by the results. In a direct comparison, using as close to the same visual quality settings as we could, Handbrake's circa February 2008 X264 codec actually beat the Elemental encoder by almost a minute. Image quality was roughly the same; we've included several stills below so you can directly compare the results.

Baseline comparison: In this relatively high-motion scene, you can see that both codecs look roughly the same. Both suffer some compression artifcats, but as a whole the quality is roughly equal.

TEST #2: BASELINE "APPLES-TO-APPLES"

	Handbrake custom baseline (see command line at end of article)	BadaBoom PS3 (480p)
PeeWeeMark (sec)	1059	1097
File Size (gb)	1.43	1.7

Test #3: Best Quality Settings

Next up, we tested using the highest quality presets in both Badaboom and Handbrake. If the PS3 setting used above is a format commonly used by folks who want to stream video to their game consoles, this is the format for people who want true archival quality backups of their DVDs. The Handbrake Deuce Six Quatre profile uses a two-pass encode to transcode your video to a video that's nigh indistinguishable from the original DVD at a fraction of its original size. On the other hand, Badaboom uses the exact same baseline profile, scales the video up to 720p, and sets the average bitrate to a whopping 8,000kbit/sec. The end result for Handbrake was an encode that took about three times longer than Badaboom, but it created a file that's half the size of the and looks twice as good as the GPU-accelerated transcoder.

Best Quality: At the best quality settings for the two apps, Handbrake took much longer to complete, but the final encode was approximately half the size, and was the best looking of all of our test videos. The compression errors that we saw in previous test runs were exacerbated here by the unnecessary upscaling to 720p.

TEST#3: BEST QUALITY

	Badaboom Custom Media Center Profile	Handbrake Deuce Six Quatre
PeeWeeMark (sec)	2472	7142
File Size (gb)	4.58	1.84

TEST #4: THE IPHONE CONVERSION

Things got a little more interesting for Badaboom when we started looking at decreasing the resolution at the same time we transcoded from MPEG2 content to H.264—as you would when you convert a movie to play on your iPhone. Performance damn near kicked ass for this test run, and we don't really mind sacrificing a little quality for a much faster transcode, especially since we'll be watching these videos on a tiny phone screen. So, how much faster is Badaboom in this test? The GPU-accelerated app finished the video transcode in approximately half the time it took Handbrake (again, using the presets, but using the same 1500kbit/s bitrate). Check the stills below for the image quality differences.

The iPhone Test: This is where Badaboom really shines. When scaling your video down to a lower resolution at the same time it transcodes, Badaboom absolutely crushes Handbrake, and because it's for viewing on a pocket-sized screen, we barely notice the image quality hit.

TEST #4: ENCODING FOR IPHONE

	Badaboom Custom iPhone	Handbrake iPhone
PeeWeeMark (sec)	728	1548
File Size (gb)	0.074	1.04

The Upshot

I was surprised by Badaboom—both by the image quality it produces using the baseline H.264 profile, and by its performance. However, I'm not surprised that the nascent app didn't deliver a 10X H.264 video encoding perforamnce boost, despite the benchmarks Nvidia demoed this spring and summer that seemed to indicate GPU-based encoding was insanely fast. When compared in an apples-to-apples fashion with a multi-threaded encoder running on the cheapest quad-core CPU available (2.4GHz Q6600s are available at Newegg for $185 today), the results are much less impressive than the 8x to 10x speed up promised by Nvidia's demos (which used a single-threaded iTunes plugin running on the same slow quad core, so only 25 percent of the rig's CPU power was being used). 

For video encodes, Badaboom is promising. It will be more so when Elemental decides to support the H.264 high profile, which it must do to compete with free CPU-based applications. For people who want to archive their DVD collections, the baseline profile is insufficient. However, Badaboom is extremely compelling for converting videos to play on portable devices. The time savings for these transcodes are huge, whether they’re from an already converted file to a lower resolution and different bitrate or straight from the DVD source. More importantly, the image-quality sacrifices Badaboom imposes are less of a concern when watching movies on your phone's screen. While we wouldn't recommend Badaboom for people who want to make DVD backups for playback on the big screen, if you simply want a quick way to get video on your iPhone or PSP, it might be worth the $30.

I did experience a few glitches during my testing using Badaboom. These glitches manifested in different ways, but they typically affected the entire screen for just a few seconds. My personal favorite glitch made the Warner Brothers logo at the start of the movie we tested with look like a backdrop from the beautiful Xbox game, Braid. Check it out below if you want to see more.

Codec Concerns: Despite delivering decent performance, we found multiple encoding glitches in almost every video we created with Badaboom.

Am I excited about the promise of GPU-based computing? Definitely. Am I going to spend $30 on Badaboom when it launches? Probably not, at least not without better-quality H.264 encoding. However, despite a few first-gen problems, Badaboom is off to a good start. Frankly, I don't understand how Elemental can reserve high-profile support for the more expensive Pro version when several free apps support the highest quality settings H.264 allows. The good news for Badaboom is that performance is only going to improve as the software matures and the hardware improves.

Does GPU-based computing deliver enough for us to trade in our quad cores for "optimized" PCs today? Hell no. While no one at Maximum PC thinks those fancy $1,000 CPUs that Intel sells make much sense for a value-oriented system builder, there simply aren't enough non-gaming applications that take advantage of the GPU today for us to consider dropping from a quad core to a dual core when quad-core CPUs are available for under $200. A quad-core CPU and a good codec deliver similar performance and superior image quality compared to the fledgling GPU-based encoder, and a quad-core CPU speeds more than just video encoding. Whether you're running four single-threaded apps or a single multi-threaded app, the CPU is too flexible to consider stepping back to a dual or single core to save a mere $15. The way we look at it, $200 quad cores mean that even gamers on a tight budget should be able to afford a kick-ass videocard and a kick-ass CPU.

Handbrake lines: 

Handbrake Baseline: -i "C:\DVD Rips\PEE_WEES_BIG_ADVENTURE" -o "E:\Pee-Wee Handbrake Baseline.mp4" -e x264 -E faac -p -b 2100 -x subme=1:partitions=i4x4:keyint=120:aq-strength=0:me=dia:vbv-maxrate=14000:no-cabac:vbf-bufsize=2100:no-dct-decimate:level=3.1:no-b-adapt:scenecut=1:progress 
PS3: -i "C:\DVD Rips\PEE_WEES_BIG_ADVENTURE" -o "E:\Pee-Wee Handbrake Baseline.mp4" -e x264 -E faac -p -b 2500 -x level=41:subme=5:me=umh -B 160 -R 48 -D 1 -v 
iPhone: -i "C:\DVD Rips\PEE_WEES_BIG_ADVENTURE" -o "E:\Pee-Wee Handbrake Baseline.m4v" -e x264 -E faac -w 480 -b 960 -I -x level=30:cabac=0:ref=1:analyse=all:me=umh:subme=6:no-fast-pskip=1:trellis=1 -B 128 -R 48 -D 1 --markers="C:\Users\Will\AppData\Local\Temp\chapters.csv" -v
 Deuce Six Quatre: -i "C:\DVD Rips\PEE_WEES_BIG_ADVENTURE" -o "E:\Pee-Wee Handbrake Baseline.mkv" -e x264 -E ac3 -p -b 1600 -2 -T -x ref=5:mixed-refs:bframes=3:bime:weightb:b-rdo:b-pyramid:me=umh:subme=7:trellis=1:analyse=all:8x8dct:no-fast-pskip -D 1 --markers="C:\Users\Will\AppData\Local\Temp\chapters.csv" -v

More Images

Baseline

Baseline comparison: In this relatively high-motion scene, you can see that both codecs look roughly the same. Both suffer some compression artifcats, but as a whole the quality is roughly equal.

Baseline Still Comparison: Again, both encoders produce roughly the same quality level. Check Pee-Wee's jacket, the skin on his cheeks, and the vertical lines on the Wig Factory's storefront to see potential compression problems.

Baseline Still #2: Pay extra close attention to the sweat on Pee-Wee's brow. I

Best Quality Comparisons

Best Quality Motion: In this instance, upscaling the resolution and wildly increasing the bitrate don't really show any improvement on general visual quality. The edges of Pee-Wee's shadow are still jaggy, and the scene under delivers. On the other hand, the Handbrake Best Quality rip looks awesome.

iPhone Comparisons

Sony Handycam HDR-SR7 Hard Drive Recorder

Charlie White — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 22:59:24 -0600

This Handycam felt rock solid and provided the best optical image stabilization. Its stop/start button is in the perfect place, but the zoom control is positioned right where your middle finger rests—bad idea. We like the “easy” mode, which, with the push of a button, takes care of exposure and focus for most situations.

A touch screen, as opposed to the joystick all the other cams sport, makes navigation tedious and can leave your screen a greasy mess.

The SR7’s stop button seemed to be on a half-second delay, resulting in swish pans at the end of a few shots—an annoyance we got used to after a while. Another annoyance is the cam’s use of a hard-to-find mini HDMI connector instead of the full-size HDMI port found on the other camcorders.

Getting past that, the camcorder’s performance with our video test shots was strong, with brightly lit situations displaying lifelike color and tack-sharp resolution. It did well with low and medium room light, too, and showed us the best contrast ratio of this roundup. Points of candlelight in our low-light test revealed a warm glow, rather than the noticeable streaking we encountered with the Panasonic and JVC camcorders. Except for a few slight motion artifacts that seem common to AVCHD, we liked its video quality a lot.