qVamps is a user-friendly graphical interface for Vamps software.
Vamps itself was created back in 2003 by Metakine, who published the source code of their M2Requantiser module. The aim was to create a transcoder for Linux that could shrink the content of a DVD9 to enable backups on cheap single layer DVDRs (double layer burners were not yet available at 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 repack it into the program stream again. This makes it possible to select audio and subtitle streams to be copied into the output stream as well, which gives another small gain of disk space.
Although Vamps is a basic yet essential tool for transcoding DVD videos to a smaller size, it does have some downsides. Vamps is not capable of making DVD backups on its own, and it does not need to write temporary data files which is a big pro. This was motivation enough to continue the work begun with Vamps and create qVamps.
qVamps is a GUI which enables users to select titles from a DVD, use Vamps for requantisation and create a new DVD. qVamps uses dvdauthor for creating the new DVD's data structures. It's important to note that qVamps requires Vamps to work.
This release of qVamps has some small new features as well as some enhancements and bug fixes. The copy tab now has a timer, which shows the elapsed time for copying. Another text field on the copy tab shows the current size of the copy target directory. The startup time of the Linux x86 binary distribution installer should be significantly shorter now. For more details and other changes, please refer to the ChangeLog file.
In summary, if you're in need of a tool that's fast, easy to use and can help you make cheap backups of DVDs under Linux, then qVamps is definitely worth trying. It may be a basic tool, but it's an essential one that gets the job done quickly and efficiently.
Version 0.98: N/A