[AAR.oner]

Originally Posted by ssamadhi97

It does the same kind of damage to the source, just not in an irreversible manner.

^^^what he said!

AN EXAMPLE--let's say you get a DVD in data format in a mail trade [or you d/led via BT] and its in PAL format. Because we don't want to introduce a "lossy-er" version to the trading pool, its best NOT to convert to NTSC [atleast for trading/archiving purposes]

If you want to make a *copy* of the shows DVD files on yer HD and convert them from PAL to NTSC for your own viewing urposes, fine by me. But, you should Trade the orig. PAL-formatted show when trading/seeding, not the converted NTSC version you made [again a loss of quality occurs when you convert from PAL to NTSC].

I say this because I have unknowingly traded for a show that, come to find out, was orig PAL and converted somewhere down the line to NTSC--i myself would've rather had the more "pure" PAL version.

re: the "destructiveness" of a Multizone DVD Player, yes there might be some quality loss, visually that is [most likely, the average person isn't going to notice!] but atleast its occurring "in-post" and not affecting the source material itself. The concern is less with one's personally "threshold" for lossiness, than it is with keep "generational loss" and "conversion loss" from entering the trading pool.

Rob--as to yer "trick" above, sounds interesting i've yet to give it a go, but will definitely attempt this method later...i'll try and run some analysis to see if there's any *obvious* indications that lossiness could have occurred, but as you've described it it doesn't sound like that's possible. It could however cause the show's .md5 checksum to fail, so i'd recommend doing this to a *copy* of the show's files and not the orig files themselves--thanks for the tip tho rob!