What is the best program to compress a DVD9 to a DVD5? I know that DVD Shrink (which is an awesome program by the way) can do this, but I'm looking for the best output possible. I want to backup "Pirates of the Caribbean" whose running time is 143 mins. If recording onto a DVDR which can optimally hold 120 minutes of video; how much quality will actually be lost with the additional 23 minutes? Will the loss be apparently visible? I will be putting only one audio track and removing all menus, subtitles, etc. Will I actually be better of splitting into two DVDR's?
MMMMMMMMMM, Kiera Knightly is yummy! Now that I have that out of the way, I just popped in Pirates. Looking at it with Shrink, in order to do a full disc there's going to be very heavy compression. For the best possible output using Shrink I would suggest using the re-author mode to do a movie only copy which will remove all menus and allow you to take out all the unneeded audio tracks and subtitles like you want and then do a deep analysis, which helps the picture quality quite a bit, before the rip and compress. Of course for the absolute best output you can split the movie over two discs but you have to consider that the picture quality in the end is very subjective to the individual watching it and dependant on the tv being used to watch it. Large screen HDTV's are more likely to show the quality loss than a regular 36" set. I've watched movies on my brother's 65" Mitsubishi HDTV that used roughly the same amount of compression it would require to do a movie only on Pirates and both of us can hardly notice a difference. _ _X_X_X_X_X_[small]Gigabyte 8INXP, Intel P4HT 3.06 Mushkin 1024 MB PC2100 Sapphire 9800 Pro Plextor PX-708A/Plextor Premium/LTD-166S M-Audio Revolution 7.1 "And we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight." Numbers 13:33[/small]
I suspect you'll get a few varying responses here, mostly due to individual preferences. Here's my philosophy, when I have to compress more than 25%.. that is... when the resulting size is less than 75% of the original movie.. then I have a tendency to split the movie in 2 pieces using DVDShrink and then re-author option with Start/End capability. I split the movies so that I have about half the chapters on each disc. Why do I do this ?.. Because someday when I have my 90 inch Widescreen TV.. I'll be glad I did it that way... After all.. it only costs a dollar more. I also start my second disc with at least 30 seconds of replay (this gives me an element of continuity). To support what Nephilim says, I actually copied this movie using the two methods ( I did this before... lol) and on my 36 inch Sony Wega.. I can hardly tell the difference between the 2 disc copy and the main movie only with deep analysis. Regards, CK
