DVDshrink quality compared to CCE?

[Slug123]

Just a very quick question to see if anyone has any comments regarding the output quality of DVDshrink compared to another re-encoder such as CCE...

If the quality difference is minimal the obvious speed factor gained with DVDshrink (along with ease of use when keeping menu structures etc) may make it my weapon of choice.

Slug

[Doom9]

It's best if you just try it. I'd say CCE blows away every one click tool, others will violently contest that but my eyes can definitely spot the difference, whereas other people seem to have less sensitive eyes

[Clixo]

imho i use cce ! you will encode it only once, despite the extra time you will need to make your perfect copy ( encode and authoring ) but at the end you will be able to see it everytime without that mosquito noise in that action scene or with those macro blocks in the fire action scenes... but as doom9 says it depends on the eyes of the one that will see the final result. so far NO one in all solution make the trick for me... maybe dvdrdvd-r but it uses cce..., also you might what to check docce doitfast and reuthorist.

[0xdeadbeef]

German magazine c't tested all the "one-click" copiers against CCE in the 11/2003 issue.
For movie-only (5MBit/sec) and complete copy (3.8MBit/sec), each using 3pass VBR, CCE results were slightly worse those of DVDShrink (1.03), InstantCopy (7.01.119) and CloneDVD (ElBy Beta 1) but better than those of DVD2One/9to5 DVD Ripper and DVDXcopy Xpress.

Transcoding may fail for too high compression levels, but can show impressive results for low or medium compression.

[mrbass]

dvdshrink 2.3 if you can keep the level to 2 or 3 then it's somewhat close to CCE quality. But honestly nothing beats CCE and I believe that's written on page 666 of the Gusiness Book of World Records.

[mpucoder]

Not necessarily so. Even though most movies are originally encoded using CCE, it is not easy to duplicate a good studio encode.
The reason is tweaking, inserting I frames at specific frames, altering the bitrate to suit the content, etc. A good transcoder will take advantage of all that tweaking, and reduce the bitrate proportionately. And, of course, transcoders never change the GOP structure, or pulldown flags, and they can retain Pan/Scan offsets and Closed Captioning.

[Zhnujm]

In my Tests i wont need any tweaking, CCE or TmpgEnc beats the One-Click-Tools just with standard Settings.
Today also proven with CloneDVD and DVD2One 1.2...

[DMagic1]

I think that CCE may give better results but only in the hands of someone that knows exactly what they are doing. You can end up with bad results and blow away a lot of time if you dont know what your doing.

[0xdeadbeef]

If CCE would get the uncompressed stream as input, it would of course produce always better or at least equal results compared to a good transcoder.
Then again, compressing an image which was already compressed by removing the higher spatial frequencies is a less ideal scenario. Removing the higher coefficients of the discrete cosinus transformation used by JPEG/MPEG creates the typical "ghost image" artifacts on sharp edges. These are caused by the missing higher coefficients which would normally extinguish the oscillation.
When recompressing this, the encoder will try to reproduce the edge including the artifacts. When transcoding, just some more coefficients are deleted. It is obvious that the latter approach not only creates less data but also a higher image quality.
This works fine for medium compressin ratios. However at some point only removing coefficients will create too many block artefacts. Then it would me wiser to recalculate the motion vetors and/or insert/delete I-frames at the right position and so on. That's were an encoder wins over a transcoder.
But for compression ratios of about 30-40% or less, I would bet on the transcoder. Please note that some of the current one click transcoders use pretty simple algorithms.

[Zhnujm]

Then all my test encodes are obviously above this limit
but i think the ct would have come to another conclusion if they had used their eyes instead of this comparing program.

[thop]

The problem with CCE is that it is so slooooow compared to DVDShrink ... i can't really waste my computer ressources for a few hours (not to mention the power bill, an often neglected thing). If it was faster (<1h) i'd use it. Maybe with 10Ghz CPUs i will reconsider.

[0xdeadbeef]

@Zhnujm:
I think it's pretty hard to judge compression results of a whole movie if the quality between two outputs is not too far part.
Even if you make screnshots and compare them side by side, it's sometimes hard to tell which is better since one lacks here and the other there. Furthermore, this will usually be a comparison of I-frames which doesn't tell about the P-frames inbetween. It won't tell about correct motion vectors either or about the distribution of bitrate above a longer time.

Surely it's also a question of personal preferences. Current transcoders tend to cause macro blocking. Reencoding using CCE (or whatever) tends to cause blurriness and edge artifacts (noise around hard edges).

[Fmazzanti]

I've backed up quite a few movies and I definitely stay with CCE. And yes, quality issues are apparent when comparing CCE and IC7/DVDShrink results. If the movie is short such that you can use a low compression level in IC7, then the corresponding CCE bitrate is also high and the copy you get using CCE is almost identical to the original one. If the movie is so long that you must use a high compression level in IC7/DVDShrink, then you see blocks in the transcoded version and CCE wins again. In any case CCE wins
And concerning tweaking CCe, just use DoCCE4U and RoBa method to fix encoding parameters...

[Slug123]

Wow, lot of answers to a simple question.. I'll have a play with DVD-shrink and a few others out of interest BUT for serious quality needs will stick with CCE.

Thank you everybody..

Slug

[0xdeadbeef]

@Fmazzanti:
Would be nice if it were all that easy and yet, it's not.

[Fmazzanti]

Why not? Maybe there are specific cases when this may fail, but as a rule of thumb, my own experience says it is... of course, that's only my experience

[ChickenMan]

My experiances have been much the same as per Fmazzanti. While the one-click wonders are improving all the time, they are still way behind the quality of CCE IMHO.

As for conversion times, gee I re-encode most movies in 2.5 to 3 hr, with 20min to author, then ready to burn. IC7 is just as slow or as fast depending on which side of the fence you sit. Compared to DVD2ONE its slow, but with poorer quality results. You get what you pay for

[0xdeadbeef]

Depending on the number of passes the reencoding using CCE alone will take several times the time IC7 needs to convert the whole thing. So usually there's is a BIG time difference between IC7 and CCE conversion. Not talking of all the additional issues like demultiplexing and multiplexing which also take their time.

And then - though I dislike to repeat myself - it's simply not true, that reencoding always creates better quality. As always in life, it depends.

If the reduction needed is very low (like <15%), you can go with any transcoder as the visual differences will be neglectable. If it's more like 30% or above, IC7 is the way to go. For something nearing 50% or above, reencoding is probably the best solution.
You can surely discuss the percentages and they will vary from movie to movie. But to use CCE just in any case, because it's the most expensive, professional and time consuming method, is not sensible.

[thop]

I re-encode most movies in 2.5 to 3 hr

1 pass? don't forget demuxing and multiplexing also needs a fair amount of time. CCE is just too slow.

[mpucoder]

@Fmazzanti I'll bet you work with PAL. It's a totally different story with NTSC.