Just a quick question. I'm using DVD Decrypter, and DVD shrink, and things are working fantastic. I'm a noob to the whole scene, having just gotten my first DVD burner. I had feared that DVD shrink would remove menu's, and turn my DVD's into glorified VCD's, with better quality, and was amazed to find this untrue. It appears that I'm getting perfect copies of my movies, with menu's, extra features, and quality intact. It would seem though, that the very nature of a program like "DVD Shrink" would imply compression. Is that happening? What sort of compression (just a general, basic question... not a querry of specific code type)? Using the "auto" settings, will I ever see compression artifacts? I'm unsure how to determine if the DVD's I've copied thus far (Justice League Season 2 DVD set) were double layer or not. It seemed as though they were around 6 gigs, upon ripping the file, but if I remember right, creating ISO images of music CD's can yield an image greater then the sum capacity of the CD from which it was ripped, and can then be applied to a standard CD and fit comfortibly. Will DVD shrink fit a double layered DVD onto a standard 4.7 gig DVD? Will the quality be something that noticeable? DVD-DL's are still kinda expensive, but if seeing artifacts is the result of using DVD shrink, I'll shell out the money. Thanks in advance guys, sorry if this has been asked before (I scrolled through 6 pages worth of recent posts), and I hope my question didn't come off as TOO stupid. Hossrex
@hossrex. i have been using shrink for almost two years now, and i can tell you the following: 1- shrink doesn't do conversions, just dvd format. 2- shrink has one of the best compression engine out there, it would handle 6GB beautifully. 3- keeping the menu or not is up to you. you can do movie only or the full disc. see you.
Quality depends on two things. Your eyes and your TV/Monitor. The more you compress something the more quality you will loose. Your more likly to spot the loss in quality on a monitor or HD TV than you are on a regular TV. I only ever backup the main movie and thus am never compressing down to less than 80%~. The more you compress the more you loose, just like jpeg images, they get kinda fuzzy. At the end of the day, if you can't see the difference with your eyes and gear between the original and your backup then you've succeded.
if you're really concerned about quality then it's better to get an encoder than just relying on a transcoder like Shrink. I use DVDRebuilder Pro with CCE/ProCoder2 when the quality goes lower than 80%! this way I am assured of the best quality you can get in compressing a DVD9 to a DVD5! While Shrink, CloneDVD2, and Nero Recode are the most popular transcoder it's nice to have an alternative when you want the best quality for those long movies like Lord of the Rings or Ben Hur or Sparticus or those TV episode DVDs!
Great responses everyone, interesting stuff. My PRIORITY (were I to have such a thing) when it comes to DVD back-up, would be TV on DVD recordings. Babylon5, Simpsons, Star Trek... etc, etc, etc... I own all these, but desire to keep my box sets stored safely away from little hands (damn kids! Its a shame I love them as I do), and unforeseeable accidents. I want to create high quality back-ups, with as little drop off on high definition viewing as possible (I realize these aren't HD DVD's... but I'd still prefer to keep the quality which I paid for). The advice here is great, I totally appriciate it. But... I'm interested in making sure these look as good as they should (as good as I paid for) once I step into the 21st century with a Hi-def setup. As a tertiary point... not as important as the above... can someone explain the differences between an encoder, and a transcoder? With specific interest directed towards the difference seen on screen, and that which would become apperent upon the best of set-ups on the current generation of DVD set-ups?
http://www.afterdawn.com/glossary/terms/transcoding.cfm you could have easily looked this up yourself by hitting the GLOSSARY tab on the top of the page..... now to understand this is a different matter. Transcoding takes the audio and video files and makes them smaller in size so it fits onto a DVD5 but it doesn't break the files down! Encoding takes all the DVD files and breaks them down to it's audio and video and rebuilds the files to a smaller size to fit onto a DVD5.... which takes wayyyyyyyyyy longer but the results are wayyyyyyyyyyyyyy better! If you want to know more about it, then read this: http://www.afterdawn.com/guides/archive/dvd_rebuilder_tutorial.cfm at first it seems overwhelming but it gets easier as you delve into the subject matter and try it out. Get the free version of DVDREbuilder and try it out. It will take a while to learn but the results are overwhelming with quality!
