some people say that CCE is better, some say HC is better, some say that they output the same quality. why don't you try them both a come up with your own conclution. just remember that if you take some sort of average of the opinions you have to believe that they are more or less of the same quality, the big differnce is this: CCE(58) and HC is free. to realy answer your question, HC is a little better; i have use them both.
cce is faster as far as quality there is many opinion's but if you don't already own cce hc is free and a great encoder. I assume by intervideo you mean dvd copy3 this is a transcoder and there is no competition but a lot of ppl do believe this transcoder a superior product compared to shrink.
In backing up episodic animation DVD's I've found that CCE Basic is inferior to HC at the highest quality level. The CCE/Rebuilder Pro combo left lots of artifacts in the animation, the HC "Best"/Rebuilder Pro made DVD's that were all but indistinguishable from the originals. The encoding time was nearly twice that of CCE Basic though. Now I recently backed up my "LOST" dvds using RBPro/CCE Basic and they look very, very good, a few occasional artifacts but 99.99% of the dvd was as good as the original. The interesting thing is that the size of the LOST dvd's was just about the same as the animation dvd's. So I think the CCE encoder algorithm is just "bad" with animation. I''ve noticed this with other animation titles that I have used CCE Basic on, and found that even DVDShrink gave better results on its highest quality settings on these animation titles. These are the first titles that I used HC and DVDPro on, and I think I'll use HC on all animation titles in the future that require any significant shrinkage. Anyone else have anything to add about backing up animation titles with DVDRebuilder Pro and CCE and/or HC?
That's very interesting. But how many times did you repeat this experiment? Did you get the same result consistently (i.e., HC always outperforming CCE)?
I didn't say that HC ALWAYS beat CCE Basic, but that it always has on ANIMATION DVD's. Most backups I use DVDShrink for 100% down to 85% for movie only. But in episodic animation (like Johnny Quest) you need the menus and they cram the disks full. In the past I've tried DVDRebuilder and CCE Basic and gotten poor results; washed out pixellated crap. I got better results from DVDShrink on its highest quality settings. The first animation DVD's I tried this one were the Starship Troopers Roughneck DVD's after getting subpar results again from CCE Basic and reading comments by some about HC being better. So recently the four Starship Troopers Roughnecks DVD's were backed up using HC with stellar results. These 7-8 gig DVD's were roughly the same as the LOST backups I made using CCE Basic that turned out very good, a very small number of artifacts but good sharpness, color, etc. "Almost" as good as the originals. --So about eight large ANIMATION DVD's backed up using DVDRebuilder/CCE Basic with uniformly poor results. --Four large ANIMATION DVD's backed up using DVDRebuilderPro/HC with excellent results. --Lots of animation DVD's backed up using DVDShrink with good/very good results depending on compression. The downside is some very long processing times, on the order of six hours. I might back up one of the LOST dvd's using HC this time and see if it is even better, but that would be from purely "scientific" interest as the CCE Basic versions are very, very good.
Yes I obviously meant animation DVDs, because I know that Shrink is nothing compared to CCE for regular movies. Let's see if anyone else has also had the same experience or maybe can explan why it should be so. It is surprising that for animations even Shrink performs better than CCE because Shrink has always produced annoying pixelation near the color edges on all of my backups. But then again, I haven't tried an animation yet. Still, I think your experience is limited only to animated cartoons perhaps. Have you tried it on animated puppets, such as the one that will be coming out and one of the voice's is by Johnny Depp (I don't know the name)?
I had one other NON-animation title that was much worse with Rebuilder/CCE than it was with DVDShrink and that was the U2 Coming Home DVD. This title, like the animation titles that I had problems with was very DARK (filmed at night in front of a castle in Ireland, great video). The CCE problem MAY be related to video sources in which there is a lot of dark areas with only a few bright spots. Lots of NOISE with CCE, better with Shrink but still not good, I used another transcoder, Intervideo's I believe to make a good copy. That just goes to show that whether encoding or transcoding the algorithm used and the source material can vary the results greatly. It would be nice if one could find a fast, perfect solution. I guess that I could use the DL disks but those are too expensive to let the kids use them as hockey pucks or floor buffer disks.
The DVD's that I copied have a black background at some point, but CCE has still yielded an excellent quality. Yeah $6 is kind of expensive for a hockey puck, but the minute that DL media comes down in price, we will be able to get rid of all this damn software that causes so many problems. I recently found out that it is possible to break up a DVD into 2 parts and copy on 2 single layered DVD's without any compression! This might be a great option, if not the best, to avoid all these issue and wasted time. I don't know if you knew about it, but I'm new to that idea and have to do a lot of reading. Here is the thread: http://forums.afterdawn.com/thread_view.cfm/2/231119
