DVD Shrink 3.0 Beta 4

[dvdshrink]

DVD Shrink 3.0 Beta 4 is now available.

http://www.dvdshrink.org/

The changes are:

Version 3.0 Beta 4 - 14 Aug 2003

Fixed FF/FR bug which affected video set to "Automatic" mode but not actually compressed. This bug may also have caused player freeze or all sorts of other problems, depending on the player.

Fixed automatic shutdown mode: changed windows EWX_SHUTDOWN command to EWX_POWEROFF.

[maa]

Hi, nice work - can't wait to test.

Beta 3 has been crashing my Athlon 1 Giga / Asus A7V / ATIRage 128 setup regularly.
Any chance of getting the Shut down option on the "encoding" dialog ?
(maybe it is already)
thanks for you wonderful program.

maa

[herrde]

Hi Friends,

while I'm not sure if the oversizing issue has been solved in beta 4 (even if it mentions something about not compressing some titles properly in the version history), I have found the solution for those of you (like me) experiencing oversizing.

The problem occurs if the Automatic Ratio setting picks a percentage which is already the highest possible compression (i.e. the lowest percentage figure)!

For example:
Main Movie set to manual ratio, say 75%
Menus set to manual ratio, say 65%
Extras set to Automatic, program picks 45% WHICH IS THE LOWEST POSSIBLE VALUE in this case.

Then, if Shrink (during analysis) detects that the resulting files will be bigger than 4.37 GB, it can't adjust the compression ratio of the Extras (which are, in this case, the only "item" set to automatic) because the ratio already is on minimum, thus resulting in files that are too big.

So you have to wisely decide which items you set to Automatic and which to Manual. Shrink must be able to lower the ratio if it finds out that its first estimation of resulting file sizes was too low.

Hope this helps!

All the best,

Gero

[sdionne]

cool.. I'll try it.

Any plans to put a multi-pass option ?

[dvdshrink]

Thankyou herrde for a perfect analysis!

I will have to modify the "Do analysis before backup" option to either (a) make sure there is plenty of video set to automatic and give a warning if not, or (b) in the event of an oversize emergency, override the user's custom ratio setting.

In the meantime, if you want to give best quality to main movie, then it is safer to set extras to minimum custom ratio and leave main movie on automatic...

[maa]

I just found a bug:

there are no Sub Pictures shown in re-author mode.
The main movie shows 6 Sub Titles and the result of re-authoring contains all of them.

I tried re-opening the film in the re-author window but that reverts it to a new copy of Shrink!

[dvdshrink]

Have you checked (or rather, unchecked) the preferenced option for "Display only Audio/Subpicture streams of significant size"? This is checked by default.

The reasoning is, if the streams are so small, then displaying them all only serves to clutter up the view with no real benefit gained from being able to disable them... if you see what I mean.

[strikz99]

Hi,

New feature request: To have a pause button on the Analyse/recode windows.

Sometimes I'll start a backup off, and then want to read my email (or something). For some reason XP doesn't multitask the processes (gee!), and it can take forever for the email app to start. This is on a 1800mhz PC, 512Mb ram, so its not a hardware thing. It'd be nice to be able to pause DVDShrink for a few minutes, run my app, and then let Shrink go again.

Bug: With Beta 3 I was trying to backup the PAL version of Phonebooth. I left most of the options to automatic. For some reason the audio on the Extras->"How it was made" came out silent.

This Title only has an AC3/ 6 channel audio, on stream #6. The DVD itself plays fine in PowerDVD. But the converted dvd is silent (though it is still "playing" audio stream #6.

I'm trying it with beta 4 and will report what I see.

[maa]

Ah thats it ! But its inconsistent because in the main window the subs are displayed and in re-author window they are not.

Are you going to move the Shutdown option ?
That would be nice.

I'm testing now to see if the same films that froze my Athlon still do so in Beta 4 ...

[dvdshrink]

@strikz99

No changes to the audio stuff in beta 4 - so if the stream was missing in beta 3, it still will be.

If you re-open the output files with DVD Shrink, does the AC3#6 stream show up with any size?

I'll investigate the best I can... really I need the disk.

[sdionne]

for the pause... it'll be great... but in Xp, you can go in task manager and set the priority to idle for DVDshrink... I'm always doing that when I encode... like that you can continue what your doing.. except is just a little bit slower... but usable.

[strikz99]

dvdshrink: Ok, Not sure what I did different, but this time I got Audio.

Beta 3 also missed the audio from Chicago. I'm redoing that one again now and will see if it comes out ok too.

For the future, is there anything that us end-users can submit as extra info to help diagnose if we find problems like this? Maybe the ifo files or something?

sdionne: Thanks for the tip. I do that now (when I remember!), but thought I'd put forward the idea anyway.

[VerbaL]

Hi,

Excellent update! I tried once more and the playback issue is in fact resolved. Nice to have this easy tool now :)

Verb

[Tonio Roffo]

StrikZ,

You can always press ctrl-alt-delete and go to the process tab, press right button on the dvdshrink process, choose set priority, set to less than normal.

Your system will be very responsive, dvdshrink will wait until processor is free

Works great for CCE too, BTW!!

[maa]

Sorry - no luck - Beta 4 freezes my system too.

Same film with 2.3 has just finished encoding.

[VILLA21]

Just installed DVDShrink 30 b4 and notice that .IFO files are accosiated
with the program and not with WinDVD as it was.
Is there any good reason for that?

[Clydesdale]

I put everything on auto calc and it resized disc to 4664 which is too big for dvd-r....?

[quantum]

Just installed DVDShrink 30 b4 and notice that .IFO files are accosiated
with the program and not with WinDVD as it was.This is a pain. DVDShrink is hijacking the IFO extension without request. I've had to reset mine a few times.

[VILLA21]

Originally posted by quantum
This is a pain. DVDShrink is hijacking the IFO extension without request. I've had to reset mine a few times.

How did u do that? U mean takes the .IFO extension each time u run the program?

[snidely]

DVDShrink is hijacking the IFO extension without request. I've had to reset mine a few times.

I have the same problem. I reported it as a "bug" in the bug reports thread. I hope it is not intended to be a "feature". :)

[daehkcid]

Yup, i also have the problem of auto compress is too big for a dvdr-5

[TCrowe]

First, I have never used DVDShrink before. I downloaded Beta 3 two days ago and I have to say what a great program. I backed up 3 DVD's with 0 problems and the quality has been excellent.

Today, using Beta 3, I tried something different. I tried a re-author of a title where I stripped everything out but the movie. I did a deep analysis then tried the backup but ran into a strange problem. For the first minute of the backup the buffer showed 0. After that minute however DVDShrink started building a buffer but never flushed it. I have 1 gig of RAM and after 10 minutes DVDShrink had a buffer of around 1.6 gigs then came up with this error:

******
DVD Shrink encountered an error and cannot continue.
The error is:

Failed to create thread

The reason is: Not enough storage is available to process command.

******

Naturally I check HD space, which is fine. Pretty obvious that it ran out of memory but why is DVDShrink not flushing the buffer? Anyone else experienced this problem. Oh, this happens with both Beta 3 and 4.

Thanks

[theboywonderuk]

SUGGESTIONS:

I was thinking maybe in "Preferences" having an option to by default deselect all subtitles - saves unticking 15 different languages in some cases!

Maybe an option to by default only select track 1 from the audio aswell (usually the 6ch english which is what most people using this program will want).

Both would be nice additions :) Keep up the outstanding work! No problems with beta 3 or 4 here :D

[jupiter0713]

Originally posted by dvdshrink
@strikz99

No changes to the audio stuff in beta 4 - so if the stream was missing in beta 3, it still will be.

If you re-open the output files with DVD Shrink, does the AC3#6 stream show up with any size?

I'll investigate the best I can... really I need the disk.

I was using Beta 3 to set up my joined movie of GoodFellas (craps out in 2.3 at the join point) and after it finished in 3beta3, it wound up only being 2.75GB in size from the original 7.4GB or so, we I had djusted the ratio so that it would be 4.3GB - I then re did it WITHOUT Analysis and it came back up to the 4.3GB I had set it for (Ratio)

What exactly is happening here? Analysis says it will improve picture quality but I cant imagine that its improved if it cuts it down to a third of it original size - I did not burn and watch to examine - I just redid without Analysis

[Fenix]

Originally posted by dvdshrink
DVD Shrink 3.0 Beta 4 is now available.

http://www.dvdshrink.org/

The changes are:

Version 3.0 Beta 4 - 14 Aug 2003

Fixed FF/FR bug which affected video set to "Automatic" mode but not actually compressed. This bug may also have caused player freeze or all sorts of other problems, depending on the player.

Fixed automatic shutdown mode: changed windows EWX_SHUTDOWN command to EWX_POWEROFF.


Thanks again dvdshrink,

But can I ask again if this feature will ever be possible?
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
request for dvdshrink :)

quote:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Originally posted by EnigmaRo
I want to ask you if you can add an option for just one picture or to add one picture with someting "no extra" :-) I don't think that still pictures are good for many people who wants to save space for the main movie but they want to keep the menus
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------



Hi everybody

I agree with EnigmaRo.

Sometimes still pictures take to much, and it would be perfect to have a extra option like "no extra" for example with a default picture created by you "DVDSHRINK", and if you had the time a option on preferences ( to select our custom picture ) you should decide what's best.
What do you think? Is it possible to add such feature?

Regarding DVD Shrink 3.0 in general , the program is perfect !!!
Continue the good work!

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________



Sorry for bothering you again with this request :(

Best Regards,

Fenix.

[carter218]

Originally posted by dvdshrink
@strikz99

No changes to the audio stuff in beta 4 - so if the stream was missing in beta 3, it still will be.

If you re-open the output files with DVD Shrink, does the AC3#6 stream show up with any size?

I'll investigate the best I can... really I need the disk.

I've been trying to back up Black Hawk Down. When I check with PowerDVD to make sure everything backed up fine, some of the chapters are missing audio. I tried with Shrink 2.3 and 3.0 beta 1. Have not tried burning it yet to see if it would actually work on my stand alone, I'm sure it won't then there's another coaster. Any suggestions?

[DVD Maniac]

Sometimes still pictures take to much, and it would be perfect to have a extra option like "no extra" for example with a default picture created by you "DVDSHRINK", and if you had the time a option on preferences ( to select our custom picture ) you should decide what's best.

At the risk of sounding like a stuck record this is my NUMBER ONE feature request. There really is no reliable solution to this problem yet - some apps have come close (DVD95, Recode, Menuedit) but they all have flaws. We need a reliable way of inserting a single frame cell in place of Titles we want to ditch and retain DVD structure while consuming the minimum space.

I am really surprised that this has not yet been cracked. Lets face it, most DVD's come with endless piles of yawn invoking crap which just take up valuable space. Some you might want to keep (Making of etc) but mostly you just want to say goodbye to Trailers, Tedious marketing of Movies you wouldn't watch in even your most vulnerable moments, Photo Galleries (dughh? on a Video disc?) and all the other nonsense that gets loaded on by the Film makers to use up the DVD-9 capacity.

SO PLEASE MR SHRINK! CAN WE HAVE THIS FEATURE IN THE NEXT BETA!

[Erik_Osterholm]

quote:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Originally posted by EnigmaRo
I want to ask you if you can add an option for just one picture or to add one picture with someting "no extra" :-) I don't think that still pictures are good for many people who wants to save space for the main movie but they want to keep the menus
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Sorry for bothering you again with this request :(

Best Regards,

Fenix.


I was thinking about this the other day. I think it's pretty safe to assume that DVDShrink is the one who worked on Nero Recode. Many of the similarities are simply too striking, and there's at least one coincidence (Nero Recode coming out with a sliding percentage shortly before DVDShrink implements a sliding percentage). Assuming this is true, there is bound to be a good reason that this request hasn't been implemented...such as, it was promised as proprietary code for Ahead, or it wasn't even his code (perhaps they supplied him with the code to replace titles with a static image). One way or another, DVDShrink must be aware that this is a desired request, and it's probably not going to do much good to continue asking. In fact, that (s)he hasn't commented on it is even more of a reason to believe that there's an NDA or copyright issues at work here.

Erik

[JFerguson]

Originally posted by DVD Maniac
At the risk of sounding like a stuck record this is my NUMBER ONE feature request. There really is no reliable solution to this problem yet - some apps have come close (DVD95, Recode, Menuedit) but they all have flaws. We need a reliable way of inserting a single frame cell in place of Titles we want to ditch and retain DVD structure while consuming the minimum space.

I am really surprised that this has not yet been cracked. Lets face it, most DVD's come with endless piles of yawn invoking crap which just take up valuable space. Some you might want to keep (Making of etc) but mostly you just want to say goodbye to Trailers, Tedious marketing of Movies you wouldn't watch in even your most vulnerable moments, Photo Galleries (dughh? on a Video disc?) and all the other nonsense that gets loaded on by the Film makers to use up the DVD-9 capacity.

SO PLEASE MR SHRINK! CAN WE HAVE THIS FEATURE IN THE NEXT BETA!

This must be one of the more complex features to implement. He's doing a great job with everything so far... I just wouldn't want to see him try to rush anything. We can still hope, nonetheless. :)

In the meantime, thanks to MackemX, I can rip all the junk out of a DVD in less than ten minutes (once I know what's what). He rules!!!

http://www.deano.dsl.pipex.com/backup/prepare.htm

The procedures I seem to use most are:

3) Multiple Movie/Extras VOB ID removal
5) Modify Movie/Extras VOB with 1 VOB ID

Good stuff...

[Grover]

Originally posted by DVD Maniac
At the risk of sounding like a stuck record this is my NUMBER ONE feature request. There really is no reliable solution to this problem yet - some apps have come close (DVD95, Recode, Menuedit) but they all have flaws. We need a reliable way of inserting a single frame cell in place of Titles we want to ditch and retain DVD structure while consuming the minimum space.

I am really surprised that this has not yet been cracked. Lets face it, most DVD's come with endless piles of yawn invoking crap which just take up valuable space. Some you might want to keep (Making of etc) but mostly you just want to say goodbye to Trailers, Tedious marketing of Movies you wouldn't watch in even your most vulnerable moments, Photo Galleries (dughh? on a Video disc?) and all the other nonsense that gets loaded on by the Film makers to use up the DVD-9 capacity.

SO PLEASE MR SHRINK! CAN WE HAVE THIS FEATURE IN THE NEXT BETA!
I agree it would be GREAT if DVDShrink could do this "in-house".

I know it's not a "one-click" solution, and I know people will say "yes - what you say works but that's NOT what we want.." but you can do a work around to achieve this "fairly" easisly. (hey - if I can do it it's gotta be simple :)

I am doing a DVD right now where I am using DVDShrink 3.x to shrink the disc down to fit a DVD-R. Then I use a couple of tools from the next forum down the list to replace the unwanted items with blank dummy's.

Yes - I'm sure there is probably an easier, smarter way to do this in IfoEdit or one of those, but I'm too lazy and too dumb to figure those out. Using DoItFast4U, ReAuthorist and Scenarist it takes me a few clicks and about 10 minutes to remove the unwanted items cleanly and perfectly. (7-8 minutes of this involves DoItFast4U running).

If you have used this "Big-3" method before to encode a whole DVD, then this modified version is really simple to do (and quick because there is no CCE encoding involved because Shrink has already done this).

The items I want to remove in the DVD that I'm doing now total 367MB. I set these items in DVDShrink to no compression and then set a custom size in DVDShrink to oversize the total by this amount. Then I run the DVDShrink oversize result thru DIF4U, then use ReAuthorist to de-select the unwanted PGC's and replace with dummy file, then run Scenarist to put it back together at 4.37GB. (ReAuthorist creates a Scenarist script file that does everything for you so all it takes is about 4-5 clicks to process.)

I agree that it would be GREAT if DVDShrink could do this "in-house".

Cheers...

[daddy_fizz]

nice idea :D i thought that it might be possible to do that way but never tried :D thanks for the great idea, this takes up even less space then a plain image....

~Fizz

[A_Klingon]

Well, dvdshrink, would you care to comment on the message above from Erik Osterholm? (Thank you).

[DVD Maniac]

In the meantime, thanks to MackemX, I can rip all the junk out of a DVD in less than ten minutes (once I know what's what). He rules!!!

Mackern's guides are indeed excellent and take care of about 90% of all the possible types of structures. There are two situations where you will struggle using the Ifoedit tricks he suggests -

1. Multititle Titlesets where you don't have a handy layer break vob to retain in the stripped Titles and you are selecting at least one Title to retain

2. Multititle Titlesets where you don't have the handy layer break vob's to retain and you are ditching all the Titles.

In these situations you need to use Ifoupdate or equivilant to keep the .ifo file structure uncorrupted so that fussy players will accept the disc.

I am increasingly finding structures which don't seem to have the layer break vob's which means that the facility to do this automatically within the compression application is going to be a fantastic development and save lots of prep time.

[jed]

Just tried about 10 dvd's using beta 4 instead of 2.3 and out of those 10 4 didn't work in my external dvd player so i have had to go back to 2.3 which those 4 work fine with. the 4 dvd's are, Die ard 1 Die Hard 2 Die Hard 3 and Fawlty Towers Season 1. All the die hards just get stuck at the Australia Security warnming screen and the Fawlty towers one gets an error reading disk. I used dvd dycrypter to make iso's on the dvd's then used IMG tool to make iso's after using dvd shrink. Any ideas why dvd shrink 3b4 does not work with these dvd's. Will the final release work with these?

[TCrowe]

Jed, try using the latest Beta build. Last time I checked it was Beta 5 but he has been updating so often there may be a newer build. I heard some people talking about playback problems similar to yours and Beta 5 seem to clear them up. Give Beta 5 a shot.

Good luck...

[jed]

yeah thanks just noticed that after i posted here so i reposted on that site and asked if that will fix it. No replys yet, but i'll try the die hard disks again tonight and repost tomorrow to say if it worked using beta 5 instead of 4.

[dvdshrink]

Beta 5 may have fixed the problem if

(a) you re-authored the disk, or
(b) you did full-disk copy but there was no VIDEO_TS.VOB file on the source dvd.

Beta 4 had problems with both these situations. Do report back and let me know how 5 goes.

[A_Klingon]

Can't really say I'm overly fond of the screen layouts with any of the new betas, dvdshrink, especially as they overlap, but I simply adore version 2.3, and have made about 80 backups with it (2.3) over the past few weeks without a single hitch. Maybe it's just me, but I prefer the simple, uncluttered, reliable, straightforward approach that 2.3 has.

I rip all files with dvd-decrypter (file mode), re-author with 2.3, compress when necessary, and burn with Prassi Primo.

Perfect backups, and to Jed (above), for what it's worth, at least with the Region 1 discs, Die Hards 1, 2, & 3, plus the whole boxed set of Fawlty Towers backed up beautifully for me with 2.3.

[Xitrum]

Hi DVDShrink,
On the weekend, I was using DVDShrink V3.0 Beta 4 to back up a music DVD. I had to remove the first sound track because it is a PCM sound track and take up a lot of spaces (about 1.5G), after DVDShrinked it, I tested out the DVD and because the default sound track was removed, I had no sound. I did fixed up by using IFOEdit to modify the address of the 1st sound track to point to the second sound track.
I was wondering, is it possible for you to modify the programs so that if the default sound track is removed, then DVDshrink will ask you to specify which sound track you want to make as default and adjust it accordingly?

[TCrowe]

It is funny that you guys are talking about Die Hard. I used my Die Hard DTS Collectors as a test with IC7. IC7 jacked it, DTS drop-outs in three different spots. Compared IC7 results with DVDShrink Beta 3 (current at the time of my test) and could not distinguish between the two, aside from the DTS problems in IC7 test.

[jed]

dvdshrink, did tests last night with beta 5 and it fixed all my probs with die hard, keep up the good work this is a great program.

[grant_h]

I have just discovered this wonderfull program, and have to say that it does exactly what i need it to do. The quality is that of wich when I played my backup copy of Red Dragon my Girlfriend thought it was the original and was suprised when I told her that it was the backup copy.

I just have one question at this time:
Why do some people say that you need to use dvd decrypter. I just put the DVD in the drive and fired up DVDshrink and it worked just fine. Is there an advantage of ripping the DVD to your HD first?

Grant

[k2]

To grant
DVDshrink works on 90% of discs. While DVDdecrypter works on 99% of discs and removes region coding that DVDshrink does not.
Personally DVDshrink is all I need since only buy region 1 DVDs and play on the same region coded DVD player. It's more important to global consumers.

[jupiter0713]

Originally posted by grant_h
I just have one question at this time:
Why do some people say that you need to use dvd decrypter. I just put the DVD in the drive and fired up DVDshrink and it worked just fine. Is there an advantage of ripping the DVD to your HD first?


Ripping to your hard drive, and then creating a virtual DVD ROM assigning the location of the rip to that drive, makes that virtual drive behave just as if you had the disc physically in your DVD Drive. your HDD is faster than your DVD Drive and would have less chance of drop-off - also you no longer need the disc in the drive, which in the case of people with one DVD drive (as their reader and burner) it frees the drive up.

[grant_h]

Thank's for the info, since my HD is small, and crapy it has lots of bad sectors and I'll just use my DVD drive. But I will need to get a new HD soon there's no doubt about that.