Interesting question

[Sasovics]

Hi all!

Imagine, you have at home a perfect DVD rip (e.g. 1 released from groups) and you want to analyse how was it encoded.
... of course just rips made by Nandub
I think, it is not possible to get back all the infos and settings used by encoding (e.g. what filters was used), but maybe there is a tool, that helps you to get back infos such as average bitrate, min allowed bitrate, High-pass, Low-pass.

Any idea ?

Regards

Sasovics

[manono]

Hi Sasovics-

GSpot (http://www.doom9.org/Soft21/Editing/gspot21.zip) will give you some of the information you want, but not enough to be able to duplicate one of those rips.

And we don't ordinarily discuss group releases here, since they're illegal.

[Sasovics]

Hi manono

Sorry, if I mentioned the groups (in fact ... it was just an example)
.. and I did not know, that they are illegal :(

Sasovics

[hakko504]

@sasovics
What I'm saying here is a little different from country to country but in general it works like this:

You may backup any works you OWN. This is called Fair Use.
The problem is the encryption that is put on most DVD's. In order to circumvent that you need to infringe patent laws to excercise your Fair Use rights. Different countries have different approaches here, but it seems that both the EU and the USA is taking more legal action in order to make the patent laws more valid.

You may not trade or exchange movies/MP3's unless it's a non copyrighted work. For this reason this board discourages ANY form of discussion about downloaded movies. Read the rules (link in sig). Only mentioning a group can be considered a borderline case, but you have been warned.

[Hectic]

by the way..saying a divx movie is a perfect duplication of a dvd is just plain stupid..no offense

[esby]

You may not trade or exchange movies/MP3's unless it's a non copyrighted work

Technically that's not really true.
Any material has to be considered as copyrighted.
Or Anybody could claims it as its own.
What is important is not (c) but permission of the author or of the rights owner, which in most of case of movies/mp3 will against any distribution.

I think that should be more like that:

You may not trade or exchange movies/MP3's unless you have the rights to do it from the (c) holder...

esby

PS: I may be wrong too, i'm not perfect :)

[hakko504]

@esby

All new works are copyright protected unless the originator explicitly says otherwise. Copyright does expire 70 years after the originators death unless his/her estate explicitly renews it.

[DJ Bobo]

@ hakko504
I don't see why it wouldn't be OK to talk about downloaded movies or anime episodes. As long as we are not giving a certain download link, I don't see where the problem is.
As long as the question is purely technical, I don't see any rule offenses or whatsoever ¬.¬
I think, you're exagerating here.
Rule 6 is quite clear, and I don't see any point he has missed: he hasn't given any link, he hasn't asked where to download and hasn't offered anything!

[esby]

Personnaly i agree with hakko,
Doom9 forums are not to support in any way groups, legal one or not...
Technically speaking of the works of the some or some other groups, is not really illegal,
But since it's like makind advertising for them, it's just incitation
to get their stuff, which we do not want... and would make us supporting them...
You're saying that hakko reaction was exagerated, but in fact it appears to me, that it's your that is exagerated.. :), cause all he did was to recall the rules...

esby

[Doom9]

well, the answer to the original question is no, there's no way to find out what settings were used. You can't even find out about bitrate caps because they're never perfectly accurate. I suppose having log and the movie in itself would make it possible to reconstruct many of the settings (provided you are familiar with the inner workings on Nandub and very few people really are). That was from a technical perspective (for me as an engineer always the interesting part).
But now from a legal perspective hakko is right to point out that such discussion is not welcome here. The official policy on the matter has been written down in this thread: http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=43617 and it is not up for discussion. There's a legal background for it though: You must not help somebody do something if you know are have reason to believe that the knowledge acquired will be put to illegal use. Not following that principle could be considered aiding in criminal action and that is punishable by law. There's a very thin line between fair use and piracy and we're going to make sure we stay on the right side of that line.
I know this is an invitation for people to come screaming bloody murder about freedom of speech and about the board team being a bunch of hypocrites since most people here rip DVDs illegally, yet we do not have any such knowledge that this might be the case. For all we know you own the DVDs you convert to another format and unless we have reason to believe that your intents are not honest we will not accuse you of any misdemeanor. But if you come here asking for help with half.past.dead.dvdrip.xvid-uti.avi or anything else that we can positively identify as content you must not have gotten via legal means, then we'll prefer not to help you in order not to get into trouble ourselves. In fact, asking people for assistance in something illegal isn't fair - people who might try to help you might unknowingly become your associate in performing an illegal action and I don't think that it's fair that you willingly accept that risk.

[^^-+I4004+-^^]

>well, the answer to the original question is no, there's no way to find out what settings were used.

sure you cannot know what filters were used..
(or better you MIGHT if you have filtering experience........and
a lot of it....trained eye can spot if sorce was filtered or not.
but you can't state exact filter or exact settings for it...)

but "divx drf analyzer" might help if you want to see
the main feature of NDub (or 311 in general):
how DRF's are distributed.........

good rips keep DRF's fairly low....(lower the drf's better the overall quality....)

it may be a good idea to analyze few good rips this way so you can know how far you can go with DRF's for particular movie/scene.......
and although in general high DRF's produce more blocks,there are movies
that won't get hurted that much (darker movies,etc.)

analyzing DRF's saved me quite a few times (troubleshooting etc.)

NDub itself has DRF pointer,so you can use that too.......

xvid had quant analyzer too.....
here
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=44754


gspot is pretty useless in my mind...it gives only header info (or so) of
avi and any editing util can do that (VDub or such)
it was so "good" i erased it immediately after 1st try....


cheers_

[Sasovics]

^^-+I4004+-^^

Thanks for a great idea with that DRF analyser. You've helped me
a lot ;)

.. and the Rest ... please! Stop squabbling about rules and rules again.
It was my mistake, when I mentioned those groups, but trust me, I don't really care about them. I don't really care if they are illegal or not. Is it a "sin" ... or against the forum rules if I am just trying to achieve quality as they released. ? :(
Because if we like it or not, we must agree, some of their releases are really amazing.

Best regards

Sasovics