AVISynth for DVD-R

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I'm new to using avisynth; usually i use VFAPI to frameserve to CCE. Looking for a speed advantage now, so I'm moving on. I'm gathering info getting ready to learn this, and I have a few questions maybe you can all help me out with.

First - Within the scripts, if I'm just transcoding to fit a DVD-9 on a DVD-5, it seems I can just load the mpegdec2.dll plugin and give it the path to my .d2v file. Is it still necessary to crop the black lines off, or can I just leave them in?

Second - I have heard of some issues feeding a forced FILM stream through DVD2AVI to Avisynth. Is this BS? Some (on a different forum) were not using forced film, they were using the decomb filters instead. To me, this looks like ass. Can I send progressive frames through Avisynth?

Third - There are apparently some issues with CCE 2.5 and some of the newer (2.5+) versions of Avisynth. From what I gather, CCE 2.5 should be used with Avisynth 2.07 and the mpegdec2.dll plugin and CCE 2.6+ can be used with Avisynth 2.5+ and either the mpegdec2.dll or mpegdec3.dll (for yv12). Is this correct?

Finally - It seems the speed advantage from this method lies in maintaining a colorspace throughout the process. For DVD->DVD, I should avoid any conversions and maintain YUV throughout the project. Correct?

Just trying to narrow down some info I've gathered. I appreciate your input.

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[hakko504]

1) You do not need to crop the black lines off, but if you filter the picture you may gain speed by first cutting them off, and the re-inserting them with addborder

2) If DVD2AVI reports 100%FILM you should always use force film. If DVD2AVI does not report 100%FILM it is usually better to leave force Film off and use Decomb to do the IVTC

3)Mpeg2dec3 will produce YV12 for A2.5. All other mpeg2dec versions will produce YUY2. CCE requires YUY2 as input as well as an audio track. YV12 processing is faster than YUY2 and is therefor preferred. The data is stored on DVD as YV12, so you must do a colorconversion when encoding with CCE. The difference is when you must do this conversion, first (with mpeg2dec) or last (with mpeg2dec3 and ConvertToYUY2). Also CCE requires an audio track present with video, regardless of whether it is used or not. The old solution was to add ResampleAudio to the script, but now it won't work if there is no audio available. In order to avoid this, just use AudioSource and AudioDub to add adummy wav to the script.

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Awesome. Thanks for the quick and thorough reply. I'll give it a shot tonight.