I very quickly went through a number of DVD transcoders (aka shrinkkers) and made some very subjective conclusions.

Mostly I used Lord Of The Rings - Two Towers DVD, and a Philips 952 standalone player for the quality review. This comparison definitely is NOT scientificly valid, but I'd like to start the discussion as I know that there are some video gurus hanging around this forum.

1) DVD Shrink

DVD Shrink is free, and most tweakable. With the "deep analyze" function, it seemed to provide the best picture quality. Tendency for macro blockyness. Handled the dark fight scenes at the end of LOTR TT very well. Flexibility, such as the ability strip credits from the end, give this one an edge.

Link
Guides

2) CloneDVD

Best user interface and best execution of DVD shrinkker seen so far. Easy to use & fast compressor. Initially I thought that this one had the best quality. The compressor doesn't introduce macro blocks. But when I took a closer look at the dark fight scenes of LOTR TT, I noticed that the rainy scenes looked somewath messy - but not blocky. For short movies, this is a top choice for snappy compression. With giants like LOTR TT, I go for Shrink.

The rest:
-----------

DVD2One: Has a fast compression engine and is very easy to use. Tends to introduce macro blocks more than the best ones.

Intervideo WinDVDCopy: The GUI has some glitches, for example in audio stream selection (insuffucient information about the stream). Claims to have some sort of intelligent bitrate variator algorithm, but introduces a shitload of macroblocks. Also supports Divx, but the bitrate options were "funny". Support SVCD, but the bitrate is ridiculous, and no settings to change it. Seems to create a nice VCD quality though.

Pinnacle Instant Copy: This is no actually a transocder/shrinker, since it applies a fast MPEG-2 recompression. There are some reports that it has a good image quality, especially when a lot of compression needs to be done. I tried this a dozen times and it crashed every time I tried it.

Opinions?

Lets wait for those dvd-9 burners coming next year. The best option would be to re-encode the whole film using cce sp but it costs and it takes too much time.

This thread is not about dual layer DVD-R or CCE re-encoding. Why don't you just go ahead and by Verbatim's flipper DVD-9 discs today?

I just said that these methods will become obsolete in less than year and therefore I don't consider that these methods will have future(after majority of people have dvd-9 burners).

Remember that flipper DVDs are much harder to produce and will cost considerably more than two 4.7 GB DVDs. So i don't see these "compressed domain transcoders" disappear soon.

Back on topic, i get great results with DVDShrink 3.0 b5. The c't magazine also did several reviews of such programs, and DVDShrink was always among the best, together with CloneDVD and InstantCopy. They used a tool called JNDmetrix to judge the image quality, which uses a psychovisual model that has been refined in many real-life visual tests. The result is a JND graph (Just Noticeable Difference) which tells about the probability that the viewer can discern the analyzed video from the original. More details are on the c't website about the initial roundup, albeit in german.

A while ago, i have posted on the DVDshrink forum about the review with DVDShrink 1.03, here's a summary of the JNDmetrix testing:



Pic of the result page in c't
Note that this is only a small excerpt from an older issue. By no means i want to harm c't magazine. If you like those kind of reviews, buy the magazine, it's truly great.

Now, with DVDShrink 3.0 b5, the focus lies on copying the whole movie, but the quality is also better, due to the recently introduced "deep analysis". I must say, if you use higher compression for the extras ('still pictures' for trailers etc.), leave out unnecessary audio tracks, yet keep the original DVD structure intact, you can still get astonishing results for the main movie.

I'm not talking about any flipper discs. There are real dual layer recorders coming to market next year: http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/54/33733.html http://www.twice.com/index.asp?layout=stor...ay=breakingNews

Sorry, i got a little confused there with the terminology. I mean dual-layer discs of course. They are harder to produce because the bonding of the two layers requires very high-precision manufacturing methods. The cheap manufacturers usually don't have the knowledge and the devices for that.

Might be so, but atleast every commercial dvd disc is made of two different discs which are glued together(even dvd-5s) but afterall the burnable discs are completely different case.

CiTay,

Yes, I once digged your post & that c't article with google. Too bad the their analysis are quite obsolete, as Shrink 3 has the reworked engine.

Nero Recode will be interesting, as the Shrink-guy now sleeps with Ahead. Will Shrink evolv or does he put his everything to the Nero Recode software. I was about to test it too, but Recode had too much playback problems when removing or compressing menus - I decided to wait for an update.

All this headache is part of the reason why I'm most content with re-encoding movies to VCD.

... In case you're wondering, another is because DivX really sucks these days. You just can't watch a "DVD-quality" (640×480 or 640×360) DivX5 movie on a PIII-733 without synch or skipping issues. It doesn't bother me in the least that video encoding takes me 16 hours typically on this machine, but it really does bother me that I can't watch anything I do in high-quality DivX.

NeoRenegade,

Really? Have considered kicking the Divx codec (as the decoder) out of the window(s) and installing FFDSHOW?

use lower-res then (or the good old sbc), should still look better than vcd.

My old 650mhz PIII had absolutely no problems with Dix/Xvid content.

But transcoders people, transcoders?

Ahead recently announced further Recode v2 details. It seems that Shrink v3 features are included (deep analyze) and it will also support DVD->Nero Digital conversion. ( http://www.cd-rw.org/news/archive/4714.cfm )

Has anyone heard of/used DVD X Copy? I have a chance to pick it up very cheap tomorrow, about ~$20. Would this be worth it?

No, i wouldn't buy it. DVDShrink has better quality for free.

I may have to take some words back about the InterVideo's WinDVD copy. It is poorly executed, but perhaps it's compression engine has potential after all.

CiTay, any opinions? Others?

[QUOTE]Has anyone heard of/used DVD X Copy?

YEs, you have 2 versions. DvdxCopy itself, which can split DVD-9 to two DVD-5.
Next to it you have dvdxcopy express, which is a transcoder.
I used both. But as both can be done bij free tools dvdfab (splitting) and dvdshrink (transcoding), i use these the most.

Besides that i prefer CLONE-dvd which is very fast. A kind of fire and forget tool. When you come back the dvd-5 is burned.

Damian

ps try to use it with dvdregion free or anydvd. it gets rid of the dvd protections, so there is no need to rip them anymore

No, but I have a question... did you encode the entire thing (3hr) onto just one disc?

I agree with Latexxx in that I don't fully see the point of this idea The c't magazine shows compression ratios around the 70-80% mark, which to me is nowhere near enough of a reduction to warrant the drop in quality!

Yes I did. If I would split it to two discs, I would not need to compress it.

I'm still fairly new to this , but I'm getting excellent results with Instant Copy. It's not the most robust piece of software around, but the quality is excellent. The key too is to select Custom resize rather than let it run itself, so that you can be more selective regarding what you keep, what you shrink, and by how much.

I also briefly tried DVDShrink, but went back to InstantCopy. If I had a complaint, it would be that sometimes it undershoots. ie you end up with san underfilled DVD, particularly with widescreen movies. In that case though, I usually just go again and tweak down the compression some more.

Based on this article though, I'm guessing that DVDShrink is also said to be similar to InstantCopy in quality?

Den.

I've been using Recode 2 to transcode DVD's and I've been fairly impressed with the results thus far. The roots of DVDShrink can be seen quite blatantly in Recode, and the quality is quite good.

Since I wrote my last post, I did my own comparison between DVDShrink and InstantCopy, using Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines as the test case.

InstantCopy 8 gave a slightly underfilled DVD, but I left it as is. DVDShrink 3 filled it to the brim. (I actually lost some of the end credits). This movie almost requires no compression. If I recall correctly, the shrunk file was something like 93 % of the original size for InstantCopy and higher than that for DVDShrink.

I then selected a few key scenes and zoomed in at 4x with my player and bog standard 51 cm TV. At first glance, the DVDShrink copy actually looked slightly better (less jaggies), particularly where there were clearly defined edges, such as the opening credits. DVDShrink had smooth edges, InstantCopy had some jaggies. I then compared each to the original disc , and was surprised to see that the original also had jaggies in the same scenes as InstantCopy. I again checked DVDShrink, and on my TV, I could see more smoothing around the edges.

Unzoomed, they both look very similar in quality, and the motion is smooth, etc.

I will probably try another movie sometime for my own interest, but it looks to me that perhaps InstantCopy actually yields a compressed file that is closer to the original in appearance, ie not filtered or smoothed to the same extent. I don't even know if DVDShrink employs any such processing anyway, and it may just be a coincidence, but a difference was very clearly visible in this instance when zoomed in.

Me again.

Has anyone here tried rejig? Rejig.org

A quick browse through the doom9 forums and other places suggest that it is gives remarkable quality with a short processing time. I'm bashing a few DVDs through it now for curiosity sake.

Den.

Hi, I checked

test report

CloneDVD,
Nero recode2
Instant Copy IC 8

I selected for each program highest quality setting.
test movie: DVD Die toten hosen , 7,8 GB, compressed to 4,7 GB, about 53 - 60% approximately, test is 2 weeks past.
slow machine: P3 @800MHz, 133
I checked several test scenes and took still pics,s creenshots on PC, and DVdplayer with still pics, too.


CloneDVD:
only 1pass possible, so it was the fastest, 1 hour, quality still ok, besides scenes with a lot action,. you see big macroblocks

Nero recode2:
2-pass encoding, double time of CloneDVD, but the result looked same like CloneDVD, disappointing, as recode2 was told to be at top end.

IC8:
4 hours in HQ mode, and they were worth it ! Clearly better picture than with both other competitors. despite the high compression, the result is really fine.


Conclusion:
if a movie needs compression, I use Pinnacle Instant Copy 8 ,
if it is below 4.7 GB and does not need compression, I take nero recode2, which allows adding DVD-rom content, or as example jpegs, cover scans, or whatever you might want to add to dvd.



edit addon August - October 2005


Now Nero recode 2 has same or maybe better quality as IC8.
I prefer clearly Recode 2 nowadays.

ReJig: I tried this open source transcoder for the LOTR-TT. The result was a disaster - in many occasions the picture shattered into "lego blocks".

My conclusions:

Being a perfectionist, I could not settle with the quality that the transcoders offer. The DVD2DVD-R w. CCE is the ultimate tool for re-encoding a DVD. Yes, the process is slow and it's for a single video title only, but the quality remains very much like the original - even in the LOTR-TT.

I haven't done more testing recently, but it seemed at adding a lot of encoding passes does benefit. You can even go high as 8-12 passes, if the movie is extremely difficult to encode or long. For "normal" movies a 4-pass should do fine, but if you can do it over night, why not add more passes?

Some video related sites say that CCE 2.5 versions are better than 2.67.x (which introduce modified algorithms). This may or may not be true - at least the 2.67.x behaves better when the picture fades in from a black screen. 2.67.x handled this fine, while 2.50 set the bitrate too low and introduced blocks (LOTR-TT, beginning scene).

True. But for right now, those devices are vaporware. I (for one) am glad to see comparisons of currently available tech.

i dont believe that a majority of people will have dvd9 burner any time soon, most of my friends dont even have a dvd writer yet! we're talking in yearS maybe.

about transcoders like dvdshrink becoming obsolete, that also wont happen anytime soon becasue more and more people use them (and will use them) to strip dvds and rip them on their harddrive in 100% quality mode. many people dont even buy dvd writers, they just write hds... cool movie jukebox...

Dual-Layer doesn't make transcoding/re-encoding a thing of the past. Then we are just talking about fitting 2 movies on a single disc, or squeezing a 2 disc movie (or movie+extras) to a single DVD-R.

i agree

There has been quite a bit of developement in this field recently.

At least the CloneDVD and InterVideo WinDVDCopy have evolved into second generation version. I haven't yet tested either of these, but they both promise improved codecs.

But what is most interesting is the DVD Rebuilder. It is able to copy the full disc content with all the extras and menus, and utilizing the fabulous CCE encoder for the task. And it gets better -- one can save bits by encoding the extras with a lower (still DVD compatible) resolution.

The appliction is developed at Doom9 and Afterdawn has published a guide for using the tool.

Any comments on these new wares?

playing around with dvd shrink, when i fill the dvd entirely i get damaged last few scenes (bad media?) what is the recommended max size of dvd then?

Why do you want to "workaround"? I'd rather buy some media that the burner's firmware was optimized for. Check c't reviews for example. Recommended maximum size is of course the full DVD-R size for best quality.

well, i just recently discovered that nec actually has such a list:
http://www.nec.se/upload/Produktblad/Media...VD%20Writer.pdf
- but recommended media is not easy to find at the moment.

(btw, i do remember some general recommendations from doom9, but was of course unable to find the thread)

url? (don't bother if it is german only)

It's funny that cdfreaks advertizes DVD Rebuilder as a freeware one click dvd backup. Well it kinda is, but if you need CCE for the best results, it's not so free...

any rule-of-thumb recommendations for dvd-shrink like what amount of compression is still 'nice'? (i just did lotr3 with 60% and it's not so cool...)

Yeah, 60% is no good. Nowadays in Recode 2, i try to get rid of all the extras (replacing it with a single color) and only selecting one audio track for the main movie (usually english). This way i get a "movie only" DVD with the best possible quality for the movie, mostly in the 80-90% compression range. If i want to watch the extras too, i make a second run where i disable the movie and keep the extras. This is small, so you can keep it on the HD, and who watches extras twice, can be deleted afterwards.

Is it possible to get rid of the menus using Recode2?

Since Recode 2 keeps the entire DVD structure without re-authoring it, it technically does not remove the menus. However, they can be replaced by still pictures (takes much less space) or a single color in full-screen (takes almost no space). This is also how you can reduce the extras to some MB while keeping navigation intact and avoiding re-authoring.

any special reason to use recode2 over shrink? (i almost always do a reauthor and keep just a main movie, one audio track and one sub),

p.s. (anyway, i'll just redid lotr3 to two dvds.)

Well, the DVD-to-DVD part of Recode 2 is just a revamped DVDShrink. They use the same engine, but apparently the one in Recode got tweaked a bit, since it has slightly better quality and is a bit faster at analyzing (according to c't 1/04). BTW, the "Deep Analysis" in DVDShrink doesn't achieve much, quality even decreased for the DVD that c't tested it with. However, "Enhanced Analysis" in Recode works as advertized, though at the expense of speed.



For a "movie only" copy, the difference between them is negligible, although i'd still prefer Recode 2 for it being faster. But it can't DeCSS and remove region code, for that you first have to rip with DVD Decrypter etc. to HD and then "recode" that, or use AnyDVD or the like.

A new roundup from the german mag CHIP. They're not as serious of a mag than c't is, nevertheless, let's see what they have to say. I will only post abbreviated results from the article, if you want to read the whole thing, buy their latest issue.

They tested all programs with the DVD "Titanic", a 190 minute movie that requires the bitrate to be reduced from roughly 4.3 Mbit/s to 2.5 Mbit/s to fit on a DVD+-R. So note that the quality results might be different if the movie wasn't so long. This movie also has a peculiarity; the extras and the main movie are in the same titleset. Test system was a P4 2.5, 512 MB, WinXP.

I can confirm like written above, iirc, that
Instant Copy 8 gives excellent results.
Even on my 19" PC tube screen the video looks fine, sharp, if shrinked down to 60-70%.

So, if I shrink the main movie to ca. 70%, it is a fine picture. This gives me the possibility to keep some (good) extras, I go even down to 55-65% for the extras, if 60%+, then even the extras have really good quality.
I try to keep normally even 2 audio tracks, mainly English/original audio and the German audio track, works out fine normally.

As written above by me, there is a clear quality difference between IC8 & Nero recode2, with IC8 showing finer details, using way smaller "blocks", so that you don't see "blocks", where you see "blocks" already, if u should have shrinked by recode2 to same percentage of size.

ok, so i auhored a lil dvd (about 2 gigs) and now i would like to use ic8 (or similar app) to get 700 megs 'miniDVD' version out of it..., any way to force ic8 to use 700 megs limit somehow? (the registry hack in the manual is probably for the old versions only)

You can select preferred target in settings, DVD, SVCD, VCD, iirc.

Probably this would not be your target, as you want mini-DVD, DVD on 700MB.

So, you can use simply the size-slider, and adjust the quality of your video tracks so, that you get as result as near as 700 MB on the slider.

edit addon:

Probably you will get the really best results for such a small size of 700 MB, if you use CCE Cinema Craft encoder for the video content.

yup, ill probably reencode the original to pal/2, none of the transcoders allow me to go that low anyway

uhmm, cce is a bit overexpensive to me, and by running some tests in the trial version, results for interlaced material are always worse than when i use mainconcept (inside premiere pro), i tested also tmpgenc and quenc and results are even worse, althought quenc is showing some promising results on few frames, i do hope Nic will fix this little app in the near future. (tmpgenc is giving me shit.frames all the way, something happening in the top of the picture, similar to the good old analog drop-outs.)

p.s. source is 16:9 anamorfic interlaced DV.

Can anyone comment on the stability of DVD Rebuilder?

So far I have used CloneDVD (beware if app reports unable to detect layer change) & IC 8.0.3 without big problems. I would like to use DVD Rebuilder with CCE's encoder but I really don't want to get unplayable or wrongly copied DVD's as they don't come cheap for me.

I would be interested in DVD rebuilder with CCE, as I like CCE's results from my previous XSVCD experiences.

Do you have a link to a good guide (a simple howto somewhere ? ) using that program with CCE ?
And does it keep the structure of the DVD ?

http://www.doom9.org/mpg/dvdrb.htm

didnt test it, but cce requires a very stable system afaik.

I have used CCE 2.62 , and it worked stable.
well, I recall, that CCE required a stable system, but in any case you need a stable system, otherwise using pc would be a pain, imo.

So, CCE worked ok with my: P3 600@800 MHz, bus 100@133 MHz, both frequencies "overclocked" by factor 1.33 at Asus P3BF motehrboard via bios, so very easy to carry out. (P3BF, iirc the right name of that motehr board).

So, this old 'overclocked' pc works like a charm, still. Of course that motherboard was a good one and stable. imo, it pays in the long run, to buy certain good (not the newest but those, which got a good name already) components for the basic setup.

And it was no problem, to carry out other tasks , if u had set CCE.exe to idle or lowest priority. IMO, it is really self-understanding, that u have a stable CPU (ggg, still stable if under 100% load), memory, HD, bus system.


My problem with that doom9 rebuilder guide:
it deals only with cce 2.50 and 2.66/67, so are the options to select in rebuilder menus.
What happens, if I use 2.62 ?
And it would be a great feature, if you could select audio streams and subtitles individually for each 'vts', like in IC8.
I hope, it will be built into rebuzilder soon, then it will be a 'usable' proggie.
(according to guide, this is announced, after rebuilder is main-bug-free)