Been a long time since the last time I backed up my DVD's, and now re-learning the tools since so much has changed. I've read through many of the guides, but something has me confused in using DVD Rebuilder.

I have ripped the DVD, removed everything except the main movie and the audio tracks I want to keep. The result is about 85MB over the size of a DVD-R (darn!), so I know I need to transcode the movie to a smaller size.

So I loaded up DVD Rebuilder with CCE Basic, and it reports the need to reduce the move to 96% percent of its current size. Seams right on, so I let it do it's thing (all default settings for DVD Rebuilder since it's new to me).

When everything is finished, my "new" DVD is now 3.42GB -- a reduction of almost 1GB! What did I do wrong here, since I wouldn't have expected that much of a decrease?

You may be running into encoder saturation. This means that the encoder has given you the max and has calculated that any higer bitrate will not improve the quality.

for such a miniscule amount of compression you should use a.n.other program, ie DVD Shrink, DVDFab Platinum or something else.

Looks like I may have been hitting the saturation point after some more testing with other encoders. The size of the first chapter came out as followS (with CCE Basic being reference point):

CCE Basic (Default Settings) - 254,026 KB (I beleive passes = 2 at this setting)
CCE SP Trial (Passes = 3) - 287,058 KB
HCEncoder (Default Settings) - 288,291 KB

Does the above show an indication of encoder saturation, or just the benefit of running additional passes?

@creaky - I thought about using DVD Shrink, but I don't like the results I get when it transcodes. Thanks for the tip though!

How can you possibly notice the difference of 85MB compression using a transcoder :)

For movies, I use DVD Shrink for anything over 90% compression, or DVD Rebuilder with HC encoder for anything under 90%. For episodic type discs i always use Rebuilder and HC

Ya know, after I posted that I got to thinking about that same thing. I don't like the results that I get when reducing 1.5GB+ from the movie....

... but I wonder if I would even notice such a small amount. Hmmm, time for another test now that I'm curious =)

Well, I just ran the DVD through DVD Shrink, using ACE on the "sharp" setting and the result was pretty impressive. Only took about 20 minutes, compared to just over 2 hours to re-encode, yet the quality is about the same.

Looks like my bias has been altered, and may have to start using DVD Shrink when reducing a movie by small amounts (such as above 90% as you indicated you do). Shrink indicated it needed to compress by 98% for this example

Well, at least for future titles since I already spent the time last night with DVD Rebuilder for this title =)

After you do the Prepare phase, you can use the segment viewer and make adjustments. You can even choose to not reencode a lot of the movie which will decrease the time.

Quote:

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When everything is finished, my "new" DVD is now 3.42GB

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As others have noted it really is pointless to encode a movie that is over by only 150 megabytes so going with Shrink was a good choice.

Regarding RB, the problem of sizing is probably due to improper setup, the path to DGDecode.dll is not set. This can be fixed by setting the path to DGDecode.dll manually.