dvd2one vs InstantCopy vs dvd95copy Quality

[Demi9OD]

Someone was gracious enough to post dvd2one and InstantCopy comparisons, if possible can we get some screenshots of dvd95copy in action? If not I'll do it myself, but I don't feel like dumping cash into all three of these programs.

[mrbass]

I'm working on it...but it's taking me a lot longer than usual. I did LOTR Extended Edition and Matrix. I was gonna post but there was NO difference from the original and I closely examined. Maybe it was just the areas I was comparing.

I'm just gonna pm a few people the link of the results....wait till I do Gladiator or another movie. I'm trying to find out which one has the best encoding/transcoding engine with equal comparisons.

Here's my crap notes which I haven't edited or anything cuz it's a worthless comparison.

1547 + 4320 = start dvd95copy at 12:54am lotr repack evenly unchecked title 3

Main Movie (2hrs & 2mins long) is 4.67GB + 401MB AC3 6CH Audio = total 5.07GB down to 4.37GB or reducing it by 701MB to fit on DVD-R.
IC Pic Quality percent is 70%. Menu quality to 60%. 551MB Menus reduced to 334MB.

DVD95Copy 55Mins, came out to 4.35GB, repack evenly
DVD2ONE 7:37AM to 7:54AM Elapsed 16mins
came out to 4.36GB

MATRIX
DVD2ONE 20mins came out to 4.35GB

dvd95copy 53mins came out to 4.35GB

ic7 1hr 46mins came out to 4.32GB
set it to 4.70GB (4.36 + (2 audio 190MB =380MB) 380MB = 4.70GB)

[Aragorn]

Hi!

For LOTR comparison have a close look to the flight at the mountain side, just before gollum finds the ring, and the scene of gollum down in his mountain cave (directly afterwards). Best is also not only to compare still pictures, but also compare the movie while running (pumping effects)... I am interested what you will find out!
Also try to use higher compression to find artefacts more easily...

Aragorn

[Demi9OD]

I thought the artifacts in LOTR SE were pretty darn noticeable with dvd2one. It seems to give a granier/noisier image than the original. I have some web space now, gimme 2 days and I'll give you guys comparison shots of CCE, InstantCopy, dvd95copy, and dvd2one. I expect the quality to be in the order I listed. If anyone else has noticed CCE and InstantCopy are true ENCODERS, they re-encode the video using a new compression algorithm, where as dvd95 and dvd2one are TRANSCODERS, simply removing data from the original stream. This is evident by the low cpu use and heavy file system load when running dvd95 and dvd2one. I expect the encoders to do a better job than the transcoders, but we shall see.

[MackemX]

yo mrbass (1st post of the day and it's turned into a monster )

looking at your notes I cannot see exactly how you are doing it and what comparision you are after as there are 2 possible comparisions when using these 3 programs

you say you are comparing the transcoding/encoding engines but there are two tests you can do with one DVD. The first is a 1:1 movie only filesize allocation comparision between the 3 and the second is a DVD backup comparision and from your results it looks like you are doing the latter

for the engine comparison I suggest you use a method similar to mine quoted below and you can also compare how well the 3 do with regards to menu/extras quality with a DVD 1:1 backup by using the same methods in separate tests

To do it the way you are doing and then also allocate exactly the same space to each movie/menu/extra would would be pretty darn hard to do in one test and wouldn't be a fair comparision

that's why it's easier just to seperate the 3 tests and use a movie only file to compare the engines in one test

looking at LOTR test I see the main movie is 4.67Gb and after processing it's 3.98GBish, so that's a setting of 85% which most people will be hard pushed to see as we all know as some people can't even notice 70% comparisons (I wouldn't mind seeing the pics by the way cos you shud know how fussy I am now regarding quality and my fine eye for this )

you need a movie that is gonna be compressed by around 70-75% to get more of an example of a difference in quality and the engine performance

get a 2 hour movie with plenty of audio/extras and keep around 900MB of the movie audio,menu & extras so you only allocate around 3.50GB to the movie giving a reduction of 75% for an original movie only size of 4.67Gb

I posted a basic method just yesterday on how to create a fair quality comparision in another post

you could do it quicker as you dont even need to keep audio with the other 3 just allocate the same amount of video space and uncheck audio cos that is the constant and doesnt get reduced so isnt needed in a quality comparision so you just allocate a space for it

take a DVD with a few soundtracks and process this through DVD95Copy but you must try to get it to reduce the main movie video only by around 75%, using some maths here and a fast hand you can get it to do that, but you can do it and it may even be easier on the newer version

after DVD95Copy is finsihed load the DVD95Copy IFO into IC and see how big the resulting Movie Title is, ignoring the audio but the figure outside the brackets and make a note of it (say it was 3.45GB)

load the original IFO into IC and now you can see how big the original movie only is (4.67Gb) and work out the actual percentage of reduction (75%)

now set the menu to 100% for faster processing and untick all other titles apart from the main movie and also untick the audio/subs for all titles including the main movie title (this will take less HD space and may even be a little faster)

now adjust the slider for the movie title so that it predicts a size that is say 7% higher (3.69Gb) for IC's inaccuracy than DVD95Copy's resulting size so you will hopefully end up with a movie only size the same as DVD95Copy

with DVD2One uncheck all audio/subs and allocate 3.45GB for the movie only finished product by reserving 0.92Gb

and if you had CCE you could even use that for a compare also by allocating the same 3.45Gb for CCE movie only end result

with this method you could get all 4 to produce a video only file of around 3.45Gb (or whatever DVD95Copy produces firstly)

hope you understand my method and this is what I would call a 'true' best transcoding/encoding engine comparision as you have taken a movie only and compressed all 4 to the same size, so it is a like for like comparision

as I don't have DVD95Copy I cannot do this myself and I notice you can now set the quality in DVD95Copy so you could use IC 1st at a setting of 80% (probably work out at 75%)and then use that as the target for DVD95Copy and DVD2One if IC would be the most unpredictable resulting filesize of the 3

comparing a DVD 1:1 backup is different as then the resulting movie filesize allocated is variable between the 3 engines so the best encoding/transcoding issue is no longer fair but from what I've seen if you backed up an 8GB DVD and kept the menu/extra & same contents using the 1st 3 programs, the quality was as follows

main movie: 1st DVD95Copy 2nd InstanCopy 3rd DVD2One
menu : 1st DVD2One 2nd InstantCopy 3rd DVD95Copy
extras: 1st Instancopy 2nd DVD2One 3rd DVD95Copy

DVD2One is 1st for extras if you don't compress them and this order may depend on compression factor of extras so they could all be the best as IC suffers more the lower it gets

this order has probably changed due to the new features of DVD95Copy but I'm unaware how well it works unless I buy it

this of course is for a setting of 75% so another test of around 30% could be done using an extra of around 750MB movie only size to compare the 3 engines fairly on extras performance

but the thing to note with extras and comparisions is the actual average bitrate of the original extra will probably be less than the main movie bitrate so the quality loss using the same 75% setting as the movie would be probably be greater as the manufacturers have already compressed them as much as they feel necessary

imagine if you took a movie with an average bitrate of 4.5 and created a bitrate of 2.75 using CCE which would still be acceptable quality and then used this 2.75 file with the 3 engines with a setting of 75% to probably give a bitrate of just over 2. The loss in quality from the 2.75 file to 2 file will be far greater than the loss of quality if you used a 75% setting on the 4.5 file as that would result in a bitrate of around 3.37 which would still be of high quality

This is due to the movie being encoded previously and losing most of the space that the 3 engines would use during processing so they have to look elsewhere and quality will suffer because of this

even though the filesize reduction is smaller when using the 3 engines on the CCE file the consequences with be far greater as there is nowhere to save this space

a CD and MP3 is easier example to understand. Take a 40mb song and compress it to 4Mb creating an MP3 with a bitrate of 128kbits, still acceptable when done properly. Now take that 4MB and reduce it to 75% of 4MB creating a file of 3MB and bitrate of 96kbits and compare the loss in quality to the loss in quality if you reduced the 40MB to 30MB using 75% reduction. You probably wouldn’t even notice the quality loss in the 2nd version even tho you have reduced it by 10MB yet in the 1st version with the 1MB reduction you will here the difference

same % reduction in size yet different quality loss results and this will be the same with movie extras but not on such a great scale so before and after average bitrates would also be a factor to note in comparisions of extras due some of them being sub standard quality having already reduced when compared to a movie bitrate

cheers matey and I look forward to your results

[MackemX]

Originally posted by Demi9OD
I thought the artifacts in LOTR SE were pretty darn noticeable with dvd2one. It seems to give a granier/noisier image than the original. I have some web space now, gimme 2 days and I'll give you guys comparison shots of CCE, InstantCopy, dvd95copy, and dvd2one. I expect the quality to be in the order I listed. If anyone else has noticed CCE and InstantCopy are true ENCODERS, they re-encode the video using a new compression algorithm, where as dvd95 and dvd2one are TRANSCODERS, simply removing data from the original stream. This is evident by the low cpu use and heavy file system load when running dvd95 and dvd2one. I expect the encoders to do a better job than the transcoders, but we shall see.

LOL I took so long writing my post you have given further evidence to support my points regarding extras and the smaller the average bitrate the greater the loss in quality due to the lack of date to throw away

hope you understand most of my points in that hugemongous post and take some into consideration when doing your compare to give a 'true' comparision of the 4 engines

also note for comparision pics get a frame from the orginal that is suffering in quality to begin with as you will then see what the 4 engines do with an already substandard quality pic

I noticed with my Star Wars AOTC that the majority of frames had little difference due to the high quality of the original frames but it was greater on these types of frames I have just suggested which were mostly fast action scenes with a lot of action going on

comparing these types of frames will give a greater difference in quality and performace of the engine than a static image as I showed when I did the 70 frame side by side analysis of AOTC as some frames were impossible to separate yet some were blatantly obvious

but that is only when they have all been allocated the same amount of movie only filesize. This all changes due to the inclusion of extras as this then has an effect on the allocated movie only filesize

DVD95Copy can increase the space for the movie due to high compression methods for extras creating more main movie only filespace and then produce better a better quality movie with this but with poorer quality extras when compared to IC. It would be interesting to see how much extra space DVD95Copy needs to produce the same quality as IC. i.e is a 75% movie from IC the same as a 80% movie from DVD95Copy?

we all know that CCE is the best engine when using a movie file only comparision, then Instantcopy followed by DVD95Copy and DVD2One and the reasons behind that are obvious and if you can't see it then that's your opinion and methods that disagree with me

I'm more interested in whether DVD95Copy is that much better than DVD2One for quality to justify the extra time taken in processing between the two but then again this 15-20 mins for DVD2One is only relevant to movie only backups because a point to note is that diehard DVD2One fans seem to forget 'actual usertime' needed and still only seem to include processing time when talking about 1:1 backups!

How much usertime do you actually need compress the movie and each extra and then rebuild the DVD (and get it working!) using DVD2One?, as InstanCopy and DVD95Copy both need only a few minutes with a fully compliant DVD! and CCE also needs a bit of work

this is why some programs are best for some people and not for others due to usertime and requirements and all the factors involved in making the end product. Some people want high quality but have plenty of time yet some people have no time and are prepared to suffer in quality loss for this and some people are in the middle infact there are the diehard CCE's at one end and the diehard DVD2One's at the other end so it just all depends where you fit in the line as to which program you use

Maybe someone could write a program that asks 20 questions including stuff like your time available, your eye for quality and what you use to view it on etc and then it spits out the program ideally suited for you, bit like a dating agency questonaire

this is why most one frame comparisions can make people's opinions vary but by now most people with a fine eye for detail will know the 'true' order of quality regarding these 4 products . The difficult part is trying to show that to others who can't see the difference and having them agree to the order as I tried it once and got mixed results (tho not from friends & relatives who viewed the images that I also saw) so no more quality comparisions from me I think, see my quote in the sig below which says it all regarding quality , but I still take interest in other people's efforts as long as they are fair

(2nd post of the day and massive again

[Demi9OD]

I used to do comparisons ALL the time when creating some of the first VBR divx encodes with 3.11 and scene change keyframes, WAY before Nandub existed. In short I know how to do a good comparison and at least for my purpose, main movie quality comes first with extras, menus, and encoding time coming in far behind. The best way to do the comparison is to take the original PGC and create new IFO files with IFO edit, containing only the original movie. Then encode with all 4 programs and get equivalent sizes out of all of them. Pull up frame by frame comparisons in Vdub through an avs script as well as eyeballing the video in motion to see how it handles frame transitioning. I will use a pretty demanding source, such as Saving Private Ryan or Brotherhood of the Wolf, long with lots of action and detailed scenes. I will probably use Brotherhood for my testing because I don't have it backed up ATM anyways

[MackemX]

Originally posted by Demi9OD
I used to do comparisons ALL the time when creating some of the first VBR divx encodes with 3.11 and scene change keyframes, WAY before Nandub existed. In short I know how to do a good comparison and at least for my purpose, main movie quality comes first with extras, menus, and encoding time coming in far behind. The best way to do the comparison is to take the original PGC and create new IFO files with IFO edit, containing only the original movie. Then encode with all 4 programs and get equivalent sizes out of all of them. Pull up frame by frame comparisons in Vdub through an avs script as well as eyeballing the video in motion to see how it handles frame transitioning. I will use a pretty demanding source, such as Saving Private Ryan or Brotherhood of the Wolf, long with lots of action and detailed scenes. I will probably use Brotherhood for my testing because I don't have it backed up ATM anyways

good to hear and I also thought of ripping the movie only title out using Ifoedit and had suggested in my original post here, but then took it out as I didn't know whether you could get DVD95Copy to create a reduction of 75% iwth only the movie file, so I gave that a miss as a suggestion to mrbass and told him just to ignore the adio/extras in the InstantCopy/DVD2One/CCE as you can adust the resulting movie only size with these 3

I look forward to your comparision as it looks like you are more meticulous to detail as I am when it comes to comparisions

but we are know the order of results anyway, but it's still nice to see the pics

[mrbass]

Originally posted by MisterX
[B]yo mrbass (1st post of the day and it's turned into a monster )

you say you are comparing the transcoding/encoding engines but there are two tests you can do with one DVD. The first is a 1:1 movie only filesize allocation comparision between the 3 and the second is a DVD backup comparision and from your results it looks like you are doing the latter

for the engine comparison I suggest you use a method similar to mine quoted below and you can also compare how well the 3 do with regards to menu/extras quality with a DVD 1:1 backup by using the same methods in separate tests

To do it the way you are doing and then also allocate exactly the same space to each movie/menu/extra would would be pretty darn hard to do in one test and wouldn't be a fair comparision

no it wouldn't. It would certainly be fair....I'm allocating the same space to each ...to see which encoding/transcoding is the best. I wasn't able to do this with dvd95copy until I got 1.2.3beta1 which allows me to uncheck certain titles. For 1:1 comparison I'll leave that comparison up to others...Personally I don't really care.

[MackemX]

Originally posted by mrbass
no it wouldn't. It would certainly be fair....I'm allocating the same space to each ...to see which encoding/transcoding is the best. I wasn't able to do this with dvd95copy until I got 1.2.3beta1 which allows me to uncheck certain titles. For 1:1 comparison I'll leave that comparison up to others...Personally I don't really care.

you confused me as in your post you include the IC % settings for LOTR and I'm still confused as to what you are comparing as you are keeping menu's and audio

in your post a 70% setting in IC for the movie only of 4.67Gb would result in a file of 3.27Gb so I assumed the movie@70%+audio+menu = 3.99Gb (3.27+0.39+0.33Gb) which is smaller than 4.37Gb

I am completely wrong assuming this? cos I doubt you did mean or actually do this as I can make more sense out of you Matrix info which shows a more fair result, that's why it was so confusing and accept my apologies

if you are doing a movie only comparision and not a 1:1 why not do away with menu/extras/audio and do it the way Demi9OD is doing it which was gonna be my initial suggestion and rip out just the movie PGC using Ifoedit and create new ifo's then allocate say 3.5Gb for each program to work with on the movie only 4.67Gb LOTR file . You don't need audio/menu/extras for a pic quality engine comparision so why waste time & HD space processing it 3 times

the extra/menu comparisions will be totally different due to some having lower average bitrates and quality so test those separately as I explained in previous posts somewhere

unless you use a high original filesize movie you will be hard pushed to see the difference even in frame comparisions and impossible during playback for most movies. Something like Saving Private Ryan is a good one to use for comparisions of movie only as then you suffer noticable quality loss due to large original movie only filesize

thanks for the pics and even I can hardly see a difference if any . You would have to zoom in 4X to see any difference in quality in the pics but I don't think anyone watches a movie at 4X zoom using framestep

what I and probably a few others would like to see is what happens when you actually make these programs work hard and have to use more than the black areas. Squeeze 5Gb of movie only into 3.5Gb or use a 70% setting would be noticable as higher than 80% the difference is very minimal and not even visible on most playback systems unless you use pause & zoom

that's why I look forward to Demi9OD's comparision as he is gonna make these babies work for their living . Keep up the good work too mrbass and I also look forward to your comparisons aswell

[MackemX]

well I've got me a copy of DVD95Copy and had a play just now and I must say the results are quite impressive

movie quality is of a very high quality and extras are excellent also even at a very low percentage (I take it all back SniperKilla )

this looks like it gonna be the best option for 1:1 for me

it's simplicity is simple
it's accuracy in filesize is just about right
it's speed it great also, took me 47mins to do Blade 2
you can actually remove Titles without destroying DVD structure
what more do you need? (it will even wipe your bottom for you)

so for my needs this knocks IC off the top spot for 1:1 backups (or 0.9/1) due to the overall package and its features and the job it does

there's nothing to fault with it and Digimedic seems to be ironing out any bugs that do appear as fast as he can unlike some I know ( I've already sent him a few minor ones)

I'm not gonna bother with comparisions as others are doing that but I am more than impressed with the results thats all I can say

the registration idea is not as bad as it seems as all it does is generate a simple code in an email that contains a 12 character code, your name and email, so no real harm in that as I thought it contained personal info but 12 characters of info cant exactly contain your life story or the gory details of your HD

if this continues to improve as fast as it has been then it will rule the roost if it doesn't already

boy have I changed my tune (sorry Pinnacle), but the full version of DVD95Copy is in no way the same as the trial version that I had based my opinion on before as there have been updates since then

there is even a 10 day money back if you are not satisfied. Now that can't be bad and I doubt very much you will be disatisfied after 10 days and you are more likely to be impressed

I know this is based on one DVD but I will be doing more don't worry

:me puts IC back in drawer:

[MackemX]

new version of DVD2One is out now that does 1:1, so we have all 3 in the same ballgame now. All the better for us users

so now you can compare all 3 using a 1:1 backup

I notice you can't strip out the titles using DVD2One but thats simple enough to overcome by using the Ifoedit strip with a little learning for newbies, for the oldies it should be a breeze to overcome

[waldok]

Taken from the dvd2one site :

Full disk copy mode added. Please note that the image quality will be less than when you use movie-only copymode, because there is more data to copy and also all soundtracks will be included.

He He : image quality will be less than when you use movie-only cause there's more data to copy and ALL soundtracks WILL be included.

Well, it says it all about "custom" backups. You've got the choice between movie only or the whole stuff.

I don't think this one is a winner.
Securing the software was really a BIG mistake and a waste of time.

Waldok

[mpucoder]

You may be wondering why this thread survived so long with all the problems in the past. Simply because the discussion was about how to make a fair comparison. But we don't want to stray from that subject. View the images, draw your own conclusions, KEEP IT TO YOURSELF. We have a rule against asking "what's best" simply because objective questions bring out the worst in people. So, it follows that we don't want the same result as if someone asked "what's best".

[Demi9OD]

OK, all my encodes are done, I will do my comparisons and have a web page up some time this weekend. Initial results are putting dvd2one and dvd95copy at almost identical levels, I have not had a chance to look at CCE and Instant Copy yet (at work, remote desktop sucks for image viewing )

1) Methodology was as follows, ripped movie title only.
2) Re-created ifos with IFO edit.
3) Encoded movie with 1 soundtrack to 4.36 gigs with every program.
4) Created frameserve from each encode and compared frame by frame in Vdub with 1280*720 bicubic resize.

The video size on each of the encodes is almost identical, withen 50 megs of eachother, took a couple of encodes to get them all right. Look for a link this weekend.

[MackemX]

looking forward to the post and I promise I will keep my mouth shut and just refer to the quote in my sig

[wgw]

You might also capture a series of frames from Dvd2one and Dvd95copy that show artifacts from transcoding and compare crc's. I found the same frame from both programs to be identical much of the time.

Is there a program that will compare 2 video streams and tell you the percentage or quantity of identical frames.

[mrbass]

Originally posted by Demi9OD
Someone was gracious enough to post dvd2one and InstantCopy comparisons, if possible can we get some screenshots of dvd95copy in action? If not I'll do it myself, but I don't feel like dumping cash into all three of these programs.

Ok...I've made up my mind..to each their own...please remember that. And do your own tests to. Thank you.

dvd2one, dvd95copy, instantcopy 3 way comparsion 2MB download
http://www.mrbass.org/instantcopy/gladeheateher.zip

I'm still waiting for yours Demi9OD

[MackemX]

top work mrbass

thats a fine example and I think you will agree that two are about the same quality and one stands out


I'll let the rest of you argue, but I can't imagine what you are gonna argue about

[wgw]

This is no fun if you can't voice your opinion.