using videocalc to determine bitrate..

[parke02]

Im trying to use videocalc to measure avg. bitrate of my dvds before i decide to either use dvdshrink to backup the entire dvd or use dvd-rebuilder to backup only the movie.

Im not sure im using videocalc correctly though. What im doing is loading the dvd in DVD shrink to find the length of the main movie, and then turning off all compression options to find the total size of the dvd. I enter that as a custom size into the 'disc size' option. Then I see how many audio tracks there are on the main movie and add up the size of the menu and extras combined and enter that into the 'other assets' section. Am i doing this correct?

Whats the point of entering the size of the extras? I get the same value if i just use the size of the movie as the disc size and enter a 0 for 'other assets'.

Another question.. I'm not sure I understand when to use dvd-rebuilder instead of dvd shrink. From my understanding, the compression percentage doesnt matter, only the avg bitrate of the movie after transcoding. What bitrate should i be aiming for if i want my movies to look nice on my 50" tv? Will reencoding the movie with dvd-rebuilder always look better than using dvd shrink? If I can backup the entire dvd, including extras, and the bitrate after encoding is 4000+, will i notice a difference if I do the same with DVD-rebuilder?

Thanks in advance for any help.

[hallway]

There was a thread in the DVD Rebuilder forum where a guy compared a movie done in Shrink and done in DVD-RB. The movie only req'd 20% compression according to DVD Shrink, i.e. Shrink listed 80% as the value. He watched both movies and couldn't tell a difference. The author of DVD-RB didn't dispute his findings.

Another thread has someone saying that 75% and higher that Shrink does fine and most people won't be able to see a difference.

It's when a movie is in the 50-65% range that most people will agree that DVD-RB will do a far better job.