Shrink vs Rebuilder

Thinking about the overall issue during usual bouts of mid-night sleeplessness the question of pre-burn quality process (Rebuilder)versus post-burn quality processing (player Up Conversion or Viudeo Processor)and the associated costs.

Using "shrink" level file processing that works easily, quickly and well on my out-of-date but still capable for most things PC if I take regular dvd player output for my 720p front projector and attempt to stretch the native 480 lines of the dvd file content across a 120 inch diagonal it looks simply lousy - awful - pixelated - crummy.

But if I take that same "shrunk" file and play with decent Up Converting player with HDMI to the PJ the added resolution and whatever other "tricks" the Up Converting the image processer does the results are a 120 inch diagonal clean looking darn near HD presentation of the video (at least to our old eyeballs and in the final analysis the eyes always have the last vote).

I know someone who whispers in my ear that if I opt to buy a DVO Edge video processor the visual result will be significantly better than simple player Up Conversion and the Edge is about 1/2 the price of a good PC upgrade.

I guess I typed all of the above to ask those with a ton more experience and expertise than I this question.

As video processing evolves and matures can after burn video processing give about as good a result as before burn processing - like keep on "shrinking" and manipulate for quality enhancement at the other end of the viewing process??

Final Trivial - my son the Computer Genius and big university staff net. engineer has offered to save me the "grinding/cranking" time of my woefully slow PC and do the two experimental shrink versus Rebuilder discs for me for my comparison.

He seems to think it's a silly experiment since he mostly watches downloaded high def. quality processed video movie files that live on one of several media servers in his house that he pulls to his digital tv and/or projector across his high speed home network - I am WAY, WAY to old fashioned to try to go there.
Best to all and Thank Again for patiently answering my questions!

 

Hi

Just discovered this great site while looking for some pointers on using DVD Shrink and DVD Fab!

Hadn't previously heard of DVD Rebuilder - looks great, but as I won't be upgrading my oldish machine for another 3 months or so, I doubt if I would have the patience to wait 4 or 5 hours per dvd. But when I get my quad core - definitely!!

One comment on DVD Fab - it gives you the option of removing the very annoying Copyright warning, but keeping the menus, but with DVD Shrink you can apparently only have both or neither.

Now to my question. Using DVD Shrink it's possible to edit within the Chapters of a DVD (but not very accurately - it would be great to do this down to a frame by frame level).

DVD Fab doesn't allow this - does anyone know of any other software that allows this? Does DVD Rebuilder?

Finally - do the various comments on DVD Rebuilder refer to the free or the Pro version? Is there any benefit in using the Pro version?

Thanks

Edward

 

The question DVDrebuilder vs DVDShrink do not have an unique answer.
First of all it is necessary to say which type of encoder/transcoder you will be use with DVDrebuilder; this because DVDRebuilder is only a GUI and the quality is related to the encoder/transcoder used.

Many peolple use DVDrebuilder with Cinema craft encoder; the best result is obtained with commercial version of Cinema craf encoder and several pass (4-5). But this piece of software is very expensive.
DVDrebuilder used with included transcoder may be poor than DVDShrink with deep analisys and enchanced quality setting.

I use in my experience both program: DVDShrink e DVDRebuilder with CCE SP2.70.

I did had the best results in this way:

- DVDShrink when the compression is very low about 90% and not over 75-80%
- DVDrebuilder when the compression is bigger; you can notice that this choise became the only one when yuo have compression of 50%.

For me the explanation of these results is quite simple.
DVDShrink is an optimized transcoder (with deep analysis on and enanched quality on) and when the requested compression is low it is the best choice. This because a transcoder do not change the compression strategy but only eliminates redundancy.
A real encoder, instead, needs to decode and recode the film with a new compression strategy. The compression strategy is a very complex job and when you use DVDRebuilder the parameter used is a compromise for standard situation.
So...only if the compression is HIgh the encoder with standard strategy will result superior to a transcoder.

Naturally if you are an expert man capable to set all the compression parameter of Cinema craft encoder and optimize over the material to be compressed a real encoder will be always superior to a simple transcoder.....but this is not the real condition.

I hope to be useful

Bye

 

For what its worth.
As far as image quality, I have seen the difference on larger films and would never go back to programs like shrink; I haven’t used it for years, since it stopped being updated.
Not all people see the resulting images the same either, as when I see faults in a picture, such as pixilation in black areas, other people have said they can't see what I'm talking about.
If I'm using up-scaling on a player, then whether it's an original or a rebuild, I would have thought that having the best media to start with will only increase the results, they should always be better if the starting images are better.
I don’t see Rebuilder as hard to use either.
I have AnyDVD HD already, so always have it running in the background.
I then just rip the DVD as a straight image with IMGburn to a HDD.
These images are then mounted with Slysoft Virtual Clonedrive.
Using Rebuilder I work out what audio steams I need to keep, and what if any subtitles, chapter titles etc... and then save each films encode preferences as a project in Rebuilder.
I then run Rebuilder in batch mode when I’m ready, importing the pre-saved projects; the mounted images just show up as the original disks in optical drives, the more films I'm doing the more virtual drives I mount at that time.
That way, I either go out, or to work, or even to sleep and let the whole lot run without me having to do anything.
When done, I simply unmount the images, and start all over with the next batch, as and when required.
I use CCE SP2 BTW.

 

I also haven't used DVD Shrink for a considerable amount of time. Ever since I got my laptop with a C2D processor DVD-RB/CCE hasn't been much of a chore to run.

In regards to using DVD Shrink or DVD-RB I'd say DVD-RB/CCE (or Hanks, if you've got a tri- or quad-core) everytime because I like the quality that encoding provides.

I tend to run my DVDs through DVD-RB, usually using this process:

AnyDVD -> DVDReMake Pro -> DVD-RB/CCE -> ImgBurn to Tayio Yuden DVD-R.

By using DVDReMake Pro to strip out the "Extras" I never watch as well as the previews, FBI warnings and other junk that isn't part of the movie I can usually reduce a DVD to DVD-R size with little to no need for size reduction but if a reduction is still needed I haven't had a problem with RB/CCE quality.