The old 'Transcoder' kicked some major butt, but I need a second opinion...

I have been noodling with DVD Rebuilder/HCencoder for the past couple months now and I must say that it does a pretty fine job, but...when encoding DVD files in excess of 7GB, the quality just goes down hill.

For example; yesterday when I backed up a 7.12GB disc capacity using the latest RB and HC 0.24 and the picture (dancing scenes) resulted in major pixel blocks, then I did a comparison and compressed it with DVD Shrink 3.2 whereas the picture quality turned out significantly better with almost zero macro-blocking.

Tell me what I did wrong here because I've heard nothing but good about DVD Rebuilder and its supposedly 'better to encode' as appose to 'transcoding' it ala Shrink.

 

Did you try changing some of HC's settings?
Did you try different matrices?

 

I don't know how to set them, and even if I did, I'm afraid I might alter its original picture quality like tone or contrast, etc.
Is there a setting where you can reduce or even eliminate macro-blocking in dark and fast scenes? With Shrink, all I did was set it to "Maximum Smoothness" from its default 'Sharp' option and that was it, nothing mathematical like HCencoder.

It was a "Moulin Rouge" style Bollywood flick titled "Luck By Chance". I also backed up "Casino Royale" and "Quantum Solace" in the past with Shrink and the picture quality was just crystal clear, I mean, no macro blocks whatsoever and it was identical to the original films in terms of quality.
I always compare the big files with RB/HC and Shrink, burned 'em on DVD-RW disc first, and most of the time I ended up keeping the ones with Shrink.

 

Actually, my original DVD looks just as good as any other commercial DVD, but the back-up copy by RB/HC was just horrendous when it comes to the "colorful song and dance" scenes, somehow, and I hate to admit this but the results of my 4.7GB discs (some compressed from 7+GB full size 1:1 DVD with extras) turned out much better with DVD Shrink compared to HC, as a matter of fact a lot of my back ups were done utilizing Shrink and yielded nothing shorter than excellent results.

Now this doesn't mean that I will stop using RB/HC, but since I'm not familiar or realize that one has to go to a series of 'quantization settings' or adjust its 'matrices' - I have NO IDEA what those are and what/where the settings should be, all I ever wanted was to make excellent backups according to its claims and DVD Shrink lived up to it so far.

 

As I'd mentioned before, I'm not going to completely abandon RB/HC, but so far, my experiences with the two...and with a boat load of quality back-ups favored the odds of Shrink. Not to say that HC hasn't given me any good backups, as a matter of fact it did, besides the couple biggies that I've encounter lately whereas 'transcoding' did the job and encoding didn't.

I've used RB with QuEnc in the beginning and that was the worst ever, then I migrated to the much faster earlier version of HC, then 0.23 and ultimately to the latest 0.24 beta.

 

I couldn't retrieve it and it pisses me off, the damn HP Pavilion shut down on me unexpectedly last night and I haven't been able to turn it back on ever since - no power source, no led light, not even the battery can turn it on. I hope I didn't fry it, but there weren't any burnt smell though. But nonetheless, it's as dead as a rock!

I will get the log file as soon as I get the hard drive out and adapt it through my PC. Mostly likely, I'll need a new laptop, something more than this crappy P4, 2.8G MHZ, 512MB RAM, 60GB 4200RPM, No DVD-Writer heat hog.

 

There are many settings in the options tab.
Most of the time the defaults will do but every now and then there comes a movie where the settings need to be changed.
If the bitrate is going to end up as a low bitrate you should use a low bitrate matrix such as AVAMAT7. The Fox Home matrix would be used on high bitrate movies.
There's also the use of bitrate redistribution. After the prepare phase, you can make adjustments to give some segments more bitrate than other segments. You can also choose to leave some segments unchanged (no compression). This will affect the output size to some configuring on the user's part is needed. There's also the lumgain setting for HC. There's a lot a person can do to get the movie the way they want. Just takes some practice. After a while, you'll automatically know how to set each movie.

 

And how do I go about to get these settings done?

 

From the tabs on the top of the program.

 

I supposed this would be on the encoder's tab and not DVD Rebuilder? There are two programs under HCencoder's file; one for the encoder itself (HCbatch) - but this program closes with an error message countdown of 9 seconds every time it is opened. There's also another one named 'HCgui' in the same folder.

I replaced 0.24 beta and deleted 0.23 but kept the gui, there are no settings for the new version and I assume it'd probably work with 'HCgui 0.23'. If this is the right one to jiggle then where should I begin?

 

Are you using the free version?
I forgot how that one works. The settings I speak about may be unavailable.
Is there an options tab on top? I believe there is.

 

Yes, it's all free - DVD RB and HCencoder.

 

Please pardon me for butting in...
Please pardon me for being a newb...
Please pardon me for 7 other things I won't mention here...
...but, why did no one ask PCH_Dude what decrypter they were using?
I've had this problem myself with and without DVDShrink--exactly as described, so the heavy color and action sections of the film, especially CGI-enhanced scenes, went all to pieces just like that.
Yes, I found that these scenes had heavier encryption/rates by using the test tools for my player on the original disk. But my problems were instantly fixed by using a better decrypter.
And *IF* I understood DVDShrink's explanations of how the smoother works, it's similar to options available in players like MPC, VLC, etc., and would that not explain why the Shrink smoother worked when other things did not?

I'm still trying to figure all of this out, and just want to know what other problems I can look forward to, and what to do to hopefully prevent them when possible. If someone else gets helped by that, all the better.

 

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*SPAM REMOVED*

 

I would simply reinstall the original and not try to update HCenc.

 

Hi

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