Predhead, I went into Blockbuster yesterday looking for Land of the Dead and got the exact same results as you did: they didn't receive a single copy of it. I was totally perplexed by this. Blockbuster tends to be one of the worst places to go for catalog titles, but generally, they always have the new releases. So I asked one of the employees what was going on and he told me Universal Studios and Blockbuster could not come to an "agreement" or some such nonsense. Basically, Universal refused to sell the company any copies of it. Pretty lame eh? It seems since the termination of late fees, Blockbuster has gone to hell in a handbasket. Don't be surprised if you start seeing hundreds of Blockbuster stores around the US start closing shop next year and maybe even see the company file for bankruptcy by late 2006/early 2007. I've decided I'm just going to buy LotD since I refuse to sign up with Netflix(pay a monthly fee to rent a couple of movies? give me a break...) and there aren't any other video shops around here besides Blockbuster. It's worth owning and I figure George Romero will have a better shot at getting a sequel greenlit if I just outright buy the DVD. The ironic thing is, Blockbuster Online carries Land of the Dead. Go figure...
@arniebear Thanks for informing on the AEC settings. I just played around with them, but now i understand which ones to use. I have DVD Rebuilder Pro, and it does a very good job on max compression movies, if you can wait a couple of hours or so. I like shrink better than any other compression program. Nero Recode 2 isn't too bad. Just as an experiment, i have put 5 hours of movies on a single DVD5 using shrink re-author. The movies look fine on a small player, have yet to view it on the big screen. Most movies on that disc were at 45% compression or more, and i used max smoothness. Thanks again for the info.
@MaxBurn You can use the same quality enhancements in Nero Recode you just got to go into the regedit to change the value. It is a little bit faster than Shrink, but Shrink has an easier way of doing it, and since both programs are by the same developer I do not think there is too much difference. I have done some large movies using Shrink at Max Smooth and the quality was good considering the amount of compression.
I did a back-up of Batman Begins. I just did the movie with English subtitles and AC3 5.1 English audio track. Compression came to 66%. I did Deep Analysis and ended up going with Max Smooth. Encoding took just over an hour. I haven't had the time to watch the back up yet, but I did pop the disc into my DVD player to see if it worked. I watched a few seconds of a couple of chapters, and it looks quite good. Again, I haven't watched the whole thing, so there might be some pixilation I don't know about. But I'm pretty impressed by the few seconds I watched. I had some serious reservations about lower compression. Up until now, the lowest compression I've done is 85%. I'll check in tomorrow and tell you how it looks once I've watched the entire disc. Great movie, by the way.
i just did deep analysis. came out great, watched twice, really enjoyed. still no Land of the Dead here in UK yet though
i did batman begins with dvd decrypter and dvd shrink with no problems. let's hope it stays this way for a long time.
I just wanted to let you guys know that I have anydvd also. I originally got it when I thought I needed it for the new dvd copy protection. The thing is, don't even pay for it. I got errors with DVD Shrink also the easiest thing to do, and cheapest, is to get the latest version of Dvd Decrypter and just rip the dvd to your harddriv. Then just open the folder in DVD Shrink and burn away.
I tried backing up Batman begins with DVDShrink but it tells me that the disk is copyrighted and will not copy. I used decrypter and then copied to disk with Intervideo DVDCopy 3. It will not play. I tried to use AnyDVD but every time it is in the background and i load a copy program i get the blue screen of death. I am using Windows XP PRO , a 2 ghz processor, 1.5 gig of ram. 2 dvd burners. Thanks for any help
I backed up both the Deluxe Edition & Theatrical Edition, ripped it with DVD Decrypter successfully. After ripping with Decrypter, run it through DVD Shrink or your compression app of choice and it should work. Do not use DVD Shrink to rip your DVD files, you'll come to problems eventually.
