Hi everyone. I've been surfing for hours trying to find an answer to what I thought was a simple question! Out of all the DVD compression tools, which one makes the BEST QUALITY backup? I don't care about the time factor, the cost, "user friendliness," etc. Just strictly QUALITY, you know? I'm talking about compressing a DL DVD (7-8 GB) onto a 4.7 GB DVD (either straight from source disk or from HDD). I've tried Nero, CloneDVD2, Shrink, and my favorite, DVDxCopyPlatinum. Of course my favorite in all respects is the last one and I can't seem to find a program that produces such great copies I found some reviews of DVD compression utilities, but they all seem to be a bit "skewed" and definitely not up to date (the software versions they tested were really old). Any feedback would be much appreciated. Thanks for listening!
blake is absolutely right. There's no better combo for a consumer!!! To give you an idea of the times (encoding only): On my 1.8 GHz laptop (Pentium 4)- a 7.5GB movie, full disc, with 2 passes would take a little over 2 hours. On my E6400 oc'ed @ 3.2 GHz/core desktop (Core2Duo)- the same movie with 2 passes would take about 40 minutes or less. DVD Rebuilder is $29.99 and CCE Basic is $58.00. Both are well worth the money!!!
Another vote for DVD-Rebuilder with CCE. Since money is no object, you can get the original Cinemacraft Encoder for a little over $1000. Then you can run 3 or even 4 passes. Add an Avisynth filter or two (undot, deen) and your compression will take at least 4 or 5 hours, depending on your CPU. Expensive? Yes. Best Quality? Absolutely. That aside, DVD-Rebuilder with CCE Basic will hands down beat any of the tools you mentioned already. -Brett
Yet another vote for DVD-RB/CCE combo. If you want to test it out before spending money, you could give the free version of DVD-RB a try, the installer comes packaged with some free encoders as well. I suggest using HC encoder, it gives great quality but will take longer than CCE. If you are then pleased with the free version of DVD-RB and HC, spend the money and get DVD-RB Pro and CCE Basic, your encoding times will decrease dramatically and quality should actually be better than with HC encoder. But even the free route will yield better results than any of the previously mentioned transcoders you have tried. Good luck and keep us posted.
Rebuilder Pro for me too with CCE basic. Rebuiler is a true encoder, not a transcoder like the others. Makes a difference you will notice, but it is time consuming depending on your computer power. And if you really wanted best QUALITY, you could always burn a DL disk and get no compression. Doesnt cost much, and you are not encoding or transcoding anything. Pretty quick too when you think about the other options. Most of the compression tools allow you to select DVD9 as the output format.
Wow, thanks so much for your replies! I've been looking up some info on DVD-RB and CCE and people seem to agree with you all. So am I to understand from my research that there isn't a way to "reauthor" with these tools- I mean like taking out previews or extras? Someone suggested Shrink can do this first, then run it through DVD-RB. In my experience though, when taking out clips in Shrink, it plays the selected clips anyway, just with a black screen (if this is how you choose to take them out). Am I missing something or is there a way to take clips out in shrink such as in CloneDVD2 where they just "disappear?" Also, I'm pretty sure that you would lose menu functionality as well. Has anyone tried the new version of DVDneXtcopy? I'm not discounting DVD-RB, I'm just curious because my favorite program was DVDxCopyPlatinum and this is supposedly based on the same technology...thanks again and looking forward to your replies.
A great way to reauthor a DVD is to use DVDRemake Pro. Not very expensive, and does an amazing job, it can completely blank out previews/extras, and wont leave a blank screen, they will actually be gone from the DVD. A free program to consider for this task is VobBlanker, which can also blank previews/extras. It should also be noted that you can blank previews/extras by using DVD-RB Pro (the Pro version comes with this function built into the program internally).
Now on to my advise: The very very very FREE dvdShrin,use AEC and deepanalysis, do main movie only,kill the languajes you don't wantand kill the ending credits; follow this advise and forget all that talk about CCE and Rebuilder. then again, that's just me.
Don't compress at all if it's anything you care about. Quality does get compromised even at very low compression levels. To me, colors don't seem as vibrant and you can get artifacting even at medium (20-25%) compression levels, even with the mighty DVD-RB/CCE combo. Cutting out extras, splitting into two volumes, etc. is the way to go if you want to retain best quality. Thing is, not all DVDs are even encoded at best or near-best quality; some downright suck to begin with. What do you think happens when you try to compress that?
