ok, here goes i was coing to back up my dvd of queen concert (live at wembley stadium)was going to use the ol faithfull dvd shrink, but it wouldnt compress it enough, (still had several meg showing in the red even at around 45-48%, and shrink wouldnt go any lover) so i was thinking of doing it as an .avi backup, but id like to keep the menu, is this possible? also, while im here, with regard to quality of pictures on compressed files. how come an avi file that can be like 10% of the origional size be looking almost as good as a dvd shrink backup where copy could be 70% - 80% of origional
stew000, I can't answer your questions on .AVI files and compression rates but,the reason poor old shrink is going in the RED, is the AUDIO file size, it would be enormous! With shrink, uncheck ALL boxes that you don't require languages,subtitles and Audio files that you "can do without" and see how you go. There's a freeware app called Menu shrink, very easy to use from the get go, this in effect will give you a frozen frame in menus rather than the original animated one(you CAN CHOOSE the frame also)a substantial gain of space can often be had. Hang tight on the .AVI file issue, someone will answer your question sooner or later. Good luck and keep us posted eh? http://jean.laroche.free.fr/MenuShrink/ Cheers. EDIT: poor spelling.
avi does not support menus. The DivX media format (hack/extension of avi) does along with mp4 and mkv though. DVD Shrink is an MPEG-2 compressed domain transcoder. 1) Transcoding usually gives lower quality than re-encoding. 2) MPEG-4 is more efficient than MPEG-2. 3) At a low enough bitrate you get better quality by resizing down. 4) avi's often use mp3 audio. Possible that your DVD contains LPCM audio, which takes up large amounts of space, being uncompressed.
