Undersizing in IC no more! I have nailed it!

[MackemX]

new bug identified and I think this is the answer to the undersizing issue!

it's provisionally called the'static' bug :D

it greatly affects movies with 2.35:1 aspect ratio that have black bars within the actual frame image as I found out with Road To Perdition tests just now

this will affect any DVD that has black bars included within the image, but it will also affect DVD's that have long periods of darker images and also showing the same image during continous frames

more detail HERE (http://www.deano.dsl.pipex.com/backup/sizing.htm)

hope Pinnacle see this :)

[drphobus]

just wanted to know if you have time to watch a whole movie

[MackemX]

of course I do :D

why would you ask?

[mrbass]

I think he's complimenting you MisterX. Cuz he's amazed at all the bug reporting, etc. you do. He finds it hard amazing you have time to watch a full length movie.

I am too amazed. You do an awesome job and thorough and detailed bug reporting. Personally I think Pinnacle has you in their back pocket and your getting paid to find all these bug reports with the amount of time your spending on them.. (just kidding..hehe)
I have one last test running on road to perdition and then I give up.

[ZeroLimit]

we have to do all that just to fix the size. Its supose to be easy not so hard is there any program like the IC settings to do all that?

[MackemX]

I don't watch as many movies as I did I shudda said :D

I've spent quite a bit of time trying to get IC to work 100% of the time and during that period I have learnt a few things so I feel I should share them with you guys, so you can do with the info what you please cos I'm giving up on IC now and gonna concentrate more on other things

IC promised to do it all and give high quality with minimal user effort, well basically it fails unless you are careful and give it a helping hand and the only good thing going for it is the quality, but apart from that nothing much else unless you enjoy messing about

somehow the thrill factor has gone now cos basically there is no easy solution to the size issue cos every DVD has different content and will produce different results :(

maybe Pinnacle can improve this, but I can't see how they can get 4.37Gb unless they do a full analysis of the DVD content similar to CCE's .vaf file and correctly identify large dark areas so it won't result in undersizing

I'll still be around to offer advice tho, but don't expect any more long winded 3 page reports on IC :p

All I'm gonna do now is use IC to encode the movie at a high quality setting that I want, then allocate DVD95Copy the rest of the space for menu/extras and merge the two making 4.37Gb so using a HYBRID (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=49425) in effect

DVD95Copy is the best all round package at the minute and also seems to be offering the most updates and customer support, so it's looks the most promising of the 3 and would be ideal for me if it included a high quality encoding engine (though the quality is still excellent anyway on the majority of DVD's thanks to excellent compression on menu/extras)

this is my opinion and some of you may or may not agree but we are all after the same thing at the end of the day and that's high quality backups and will use the best suited method to get the results wanted and at the minute mine's a hybrid until that Ultimate Backup tool (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=49224) does appear

cheers

[int 21h]

I eluded to this when IC originally surfaced here: http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=46392

You even asked the question of how DVD2One could achieve such accuracy ;)

I find myself using CCE and IC, or just the old CCE + IfoUpdate way, because its good quality and pretty fast, and once you get used to using all of the tools along the way, its hard to stop using them.

[MackemX]

People have always known that dark area/video content had a effect on the outcome of the DVD due to the one pass as you pointed out correctly that would give varying results but I like to know exactly why

but now I think you'll agree this gives more detailed easier to understand info as to exactly why to informsthe masses so maybe now everyone can understand the workings of IC engine and not just advanced users like you and I and respect your immense knowledge regarding DVD's. They can see and hopefully understand what causes the varying undersizing and compensate a little more accurately. It also shows exactly why some DVD's cannot be backed up as movie only using IC. I haven't seen anything on the forum or any other forum I visit that has told me everything that is in the link or else I wouldn't have even bothered posting

If I think back, my Fawlty Towers DVD only needed to be oversized to 4.54GB. All the video content is indoors and well lit so if I was a newbie or unsure and used the info shown in the link I would not set it to the 4.6Gb that most people use but slightly lower whereas something like Blade II I would set higher than 4.6Gb.

I saw how IC reduced bitrates as I used the bitrate viewer to compare IC & DVD2One and IC uses an average bitrate and sets a low & high bitrate and stays within those limits but didn't bother posting info as I didnt know how exactly how it reencoded the info. I have since deleted the pics but you will know what I mean anyway

also if DVD2one had been a constant reduction throughout then I wouldn't have seen the high bitrates at the beginning matching the same peaks and dips as the original but then later fading off resulting in poorer quality. This is what confused me as to how it got the size right but then it probably made up for the early high bitrates by using lower ones later on as shown in the examples I saw HERE (http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.videoxone.net%2Fmb1%2Fdvd2one%2Fdvd2one.htm&langpair=de%7Cen&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&prev=%2Flanguage_tools) when DVD2One first came on the scene. They have since changed methods in DVD2One resulting in a more even spread in the reduction of bitrate but my experience was of the first version

CCE is great if, firstly you can afford it, secondly you can fully understand howto use it and all the other tools and finally understand how a DVD structure is built up and I would still use that method if I didn't get 95% of CCE quality (shown in Demi9OD's examples) using IC in the correct manner and not having to demux,process,remux the DVD which I did enjoy but now I enjoy the extra time doing other things

I now use a similar method to you now using a hybrid of IC & DVD95Copy as I'm not that fussed about about high quality menu/extras as 40% looks great on my TV. Using DVD95Copy on extras/menus gives me on average a 10% increase for movie space allocation so results are comparable to CCE quality if I had used IC for extras and CCE for movie but only taking around 5-15 mins user time and 90-120mins processing. If I really want to fully enjoy DVD Extras and I'm not happy with backup quality I can always pull out the original for a special treat :)

hopefully one day IC will implement an option for 2 pass or maybe another company will release a program with similar features to IC (but actually work without a helping hand) and I'll be 1st in the queue when they do :D but until then I'm stuck using Bertie Bassetts AllSorts :(

[int 21h]

Originally posted by MisterX
...also if DVD2one had been a constant reduction throughout then I wouldn't have seen the high bitrates at the beginning matching the same peaks and dips as the original but then later fading off resulting in poorer quality. This is what confused me as to how it got the size right but then it probably made up for the early high bitrates by using lower ones later on as shown in the examples I saw HERE (http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.videoxone.net%2Fmb1%2Fdvd2one%2Fdvd2one.htm&langpair=de%7Cen&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&prev=%2Flanguage_tools) when DVD2One first came on the scene. They have since changed methods in DVD2One resulting in a more even spread in the reduction of bitrate but my experience was of the first version
...

Keep in mind that DVD2One doesn't directly manipulate bitrate as IC does, but instead manipulates quantization (which indirectly manipulates bitrate). This could account for some of what you've seen in bitrate analysis.

[MackemX]

Originally posted by int 21h
Keep in mind that DVD2One doesn't directly manipulate bitrate as IC does, but instead manipulates quantization (which indirectly manipulates bitrate). This could account for some of what you've seen in bitrate analysis.
as I said 'what confused me' as in past tense, as I now know that, but thanks for reminding me and better still confusing 90% of the browsers of this thread :D

have they not improved quality again recently? as I've seen a few posts from people reporting better quality

I don't really know myself as I don't use the program but it always wise to keep an eye open for changes cos I never know when I may jump ship again :)

[int 21h]

I haven't checked into DVD2One's quality as-of late, however, due to the process it uses, its very dependent on the exact algorithm used.

I didn't mean to try to confuse the browsers of this thread, but this is a technically oriented forum, if anyone finds themselves confused, search around, the MPEG-2 compression process has been explained a few times, and if you're looking for more of a detailed idea of how DVD2One works, you can look at this paper: http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Sumit_Roy/publications/msp01.pdf Even though it specifically is talking about an implementation on Itaniums, the general ideas behind it are some of the things that DVD2One probably uses.

[MackemX]

Originally posted by int 21h
but this is a technically oriented forum, if anyone finds themselves confused, search around
LOL :D that's a class comment :D, cos looking at some user's posts you wouldn't think it was a technically oriented forum as some people can't even do the basic things probably due to inexperience yet still seem to post questions as they cannot use the search feature either and probably wouldn't search around and basically this bloats the forum and squeezes other posts out. I guess some of the other subforums are a little more technical tho

If you could take away all the bloatposts then it would be great and I've added a few in my time I'll admit and still do :). Say you could manage it a bit like your email folder and be able to hide threads that don't interest you would be a great feature

I'm interested in all the calculations and thanks for the link and I'll have a browse later as it's time for bed

If I'm ever stuck for anything I know who to PM, save me searching :D

cheers int 21h ;)

[dvdRENEGADE]

Your subject is just a tad misleading...wouldn't you say?
dvdRENEGADE

[MackemX]

Originally posted by dvdRENEGADE
Your subject is just a tad misleading...wouldn't you say?
dvdRENEGADE

It is a bit, it should be undersizing/Oversizing in IC no more :p

just kidding :D, you're right

but at least it's on the Pinnacle forum now, but I doubt they'll do anything

Pinnacle Support (http://webboard.pinnaclesys.com/read_messages.asp?WebboardID=1&ForumID=877&SectionID=170&ThreadID=133820&ThreadStart=0&Pos=4&cntThread=50&lng=1)

[SplinterMgs]

MisterX, great find and allow me to quote:

no matter what I did to the original 4.27GB video only file, I always came out with a video file of 2.97Gb yet the actual quality of the end result was excellent and barely distinguishable from the original!. I even set the movie to 99.90%, theDVDSaveQuality to 1, DVDMAxAnalyzeRel to 100% and DVDAnalysisMinsAbs to 100% and it took nearly an hour just analyzing the movie! and came out the same size

I did mention this issue in an earlier thread (Size vs Quality). My question remains however whether this smaller IC version is of better quality when compared to the 4.36G DVD2One version.

So, when faced with situations where you just can't max out the IC output, what should one do? Should we still go with the smaller sized IC version? Is there an acceptable cutoff filesize or it's all up to personal opinion?

Many thanks in advance for your feedback.

[MackemX]

yeah, it may have been misleading as I was basing that on playback on the TV, not with my PAUSE/ZOOM specs on :(

It does suffer as the DVD2One/DVD95Copy is better. Thats the first thing I compared as I was impressed by the results of DVD95Copy that I had done last week before using IC with RTP

so obviously it got most of this high quality from the black bars leaving more space for the movie image

so it looks like the other two are better, but only to a certain point cos if you keep all the menu/extras then it's a different story as DVD2One and DVD95Copy may not save all the space from the black bars

We all should now know which has the better quality results at same % settings allround for a fuller framed movie but I would probably still use DVD95Copy for 2.35:1 non-anamorphic movies but not just because of quality but also filesize will be 4.37Gb whereas IC will not have a clue :confused: and still end up low unless you do a 2nd run. I could as I now know the size the main movie will be set when wt to 99.90% so I can adjust the extras/menus to fit the rest of the DVD but that would take another 2 hours whereas DVD95Copy does it all in one go