Is this Crazy idea? IC and dvd21 work together

[lisadaveh]

I have an idea i would like some thoughts on. Here are a few background *facts*

1. DVD21 works excellent for 80% of all movies.
2. The remaining 20% are movies you may want better quality on.
3. IC is better than dvd21 for larger or more important movies, but sizing issues are a pain/problem.
4. DVD21 will not transcode a movie set that is smaller than 4.3GB, but will correctly IFO it up for playability.
5. IC looks better than dvd21, even when, with menus, the main movie is sometimes only 3GB. IC picture quality would be better if the main movie were as large as possible.

MY IDEA:

Why not use IC in an important/large movie and custom resize the main movie title to be about 4.2GB or so. This would leave the final image too large to fit a DVDR, but you would have the best possible picture quality without CCE's 7hrs. Then use DVD21 to pluck out the main movie from the too large IC iso file, and correctly IFO it for playability. This way, you get the highest quality movie title, and DVD21 doesnt touch IC's superior transcoding.

your comments here :)

[mrbass]

It'd still be as much of a guessing game as it is now.

Your suggesting doing it in reverse. Instead of stripping it with dvdtoolbox or dvdshrink and then feeding that to IC where you have to guess at the file size you say let IC hopeful get close to the target size (still might go over) and then use dvd2one or dvdtoolbox.

In case you didn't know ..when NO TRANSCODING is required just stripping dvdtoolbox is twice as fast as dvd2one (8mins vs 15mins). I've tested it numerous times.

[lisadaveh]

actually IC seems to do a good job of estimating the movie size if you only look at the main title. It seems to get all of its size errors from the combined titles and their various compressions. I have found it to be very accurate when only the main title is considered, but use 4.2GB just to be safe.

So, you suggest i try dvdtoolbox to strip the main movie as is, and then feed it to IC. I assume IC will be fooled into thinking it is the natural format for the disk. I will try this, thanks.

But, in theory, the way i mention should work fine right?

[mrbass]

yep I've been doing that since dvdtoolbox 0.11.1b came out. I always do main movie only.
I usually choose 4.5GB and it works many times and then others it'll oversize it and undersize it way too much.