DVD Shrink Nirvana

[godus]

In Buddhism, when a man reaches Nirvana, he ceases to reincarnate. That's the good news. In DVDism, when DVD Shrink reaches Nirvana and ceases to reincarnate, that's the sad news!

The good thing is, DVD Shrink is a great product. Congratulations to its author! The not so good thing is, we still want a great thing to become greater. :)

I come to DVD Shrink late. I just got version 3.1.2 last weekend and tried it on a couple of DVDs. I'm impressed with its results. Yet there are somethings I still don't know if there's a way to get around.

First, for picture quality, I try to reserve as much space as possible for the main movie. For this purpose, I shrink all unnecessary stuffs to still-life pictures. When done, the backup DVD works normally under a software player such as WinDVD. But after burning it and playing on a set-top player, the section of still-life pictures is either blacked out or frozen. In one case, I had to eject the disk and pop it back in to return to the main menu.

Secondly, some DVD has extra features that eat up very big space. In some cases, even when I shrink the extras to still-life pictures, they still occupy hundreds of megabytes on the backup disk. This causes the picture quality of the main movie to deteriorate substantially.

It would be nice if we could remove those extras completely. Oh yes, you could advise me to reauthor the disk to contain the main movie only. Sure. But then I would sorely miss the menu, the structure, the look and feel of the original DVD.

I would highly appreciate if someone could show me how to remove an unwanted title completely and replace it with a place holder. In that case, when user clicks on the menu to select that item, the DVD should do nothing. That would be nice. (And please don't tell me to do that using the Big-3. I come to DVD Shrink because the Big-3 takes too long!)

I truly wish that, in backing up a disk, DVD Shrink gives us a button to uncheck any title we don't want. It seems adding such a thing would not be hard because the current DVD Shrink already has that capability. Right now we can uncheck audio channels and subtitles. The code that supports such functionality is already there. Just extending it to uncheck video sections or titles, and DVD Shrink will pave a way for users to Nirvana too. :)

Anyway, that's my belated experience on an excellent product. Thank you, DVDShrink the author. You are truly great. :)

[2COOL]

Originally posted by godus
It would be nice if we could remove those extras completely.

I would highly appreciate if someone could show me how to remove an unwanted title completely and replace it with a place holder. How about a blank "place holder" VOB? Check out my Title Stripping guides by clicking on the :eek: in my signature block. ;) Do these stripping prior to using DVD Shrink.

[godus]

Thanks, 2COOL.

[daddy_fizz]

or check out dvdstripper (do a search for it), great program, is easy and very cheap (9 dollars i think?) and will completely remove unwanted video titles.

~Fizz

[Tonio Roffo]

IMHO (and again I say IMHO!),

First and for all, Shrink is a true Gem of programming, small, does what it claims to do, does it well, bugs get squashed faster than on a windshield, fantastic work.

It would be great if Mr. Shrink open sources DVD-Shrink. There are probably a lot of programmers out there that can build on his hard work. Of course, giving source away is like giving away your little baby...

But an open Shrink could be a GREAT platform to build on - people can add their own special desires, and the good ones can be put together in official builds. Look at LAME for example, you would think MP3 encoding would be abandoned by now - more people than ever are working on it, and quality per bit is improving by input from a lot of people.

The hardest part of programming is beginning with a new project. Building on an existing platform is somethink a lot of programmers will do without problem.

Just imagine an "open shrink" where one can choose between various transcoding techniques for example. Shrink algorithm, Rejig, plugins towards TMPGENC,... we can't *demand* things like that but we could all be working on it together.

Of course, this is my opinion, please don't flame me for this.

So Mr. Srhrink (whatever your name is, everyone knows you like this) - "retire" from programming on Shrink, and give your baby away in the hands of able programmers, or even open source it! Your name is engraved in stone now, it will be written with gold linings if you do this :-)

Yves

[mrbass]

Originally posted by Tonio Roffo
IMHO (and again I say IMHO!),
even open source it!
Yves
never, ever will happen guys so quit dreaming.

[spuddog]

godus

check out recode2

[MvB]

@Tonio

if Shrink would open the source, a lot of companies would use his program for money. They would write a guide and sell this with the program in a manner that it looks like they have written it. Look at DVDx, for example. One company already claimed copyright on this because it bought the source from somewhere... ridiculous.

[Tonio Roffo]

@MvB,

There are legal ways to protect open sourced software? GPL for example?

but alas, as MrBass mentioned, we should quit dreaming :-)

Yves

[Richk50]

You don't have to dream, just look at what's going on with Rejig. You have top professionals working on it and if you give it a little time, I'm sure it will be better than anything else out there.