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View Full Version : Simplified guide for advanced DVD-RB usage?


brashquido
25th May 2004, 12:39
Hi All,

I really think DVD-RB and RB-Opt are the greatest thing since sliced bread as far as DVD9 -> DVD5 conversion goes. It's easy to use while sacrificing minimal quality, and that is something that can't be said of any other all in one program.

However there are just some movies you can't convert down without getting a little more advanced simply due to the amount of content. I've got several DVD's that are around the 8GB mark that DVD-RB converts without a problem using the standard settings, however the resulting image quality is below that of VHS. Currently I'm converting "The Dish" (great movie if any of you non Aussies ever have a hankering for a great Aussie flick) and using standard DVD-RB settings with CCE set to 5 passes the quality is very dodgy. Easy to see why with RB-Opt reporting that a bitrate of only about 1869 being used for the main feature (I've found anything less than about 2500 gives you so so results, preferably above 3000).

Considering DVD-RB's mandate is to bring easy, very high quality DVD backups to the masses without resorting to dual layer DVD's, I think it would be a really great idea for a simplified DVD-RB guide could be created to show what you can do to get maximum content, while sacrificing minimal quality. A lot of this may seem second nature to a lot of us, but things like dropping extra audio tracks, and using RB-Opt to alter bitrate settings for indiviual VTSes may not be immediately obvious to some. Hell I don't even know what half the expert settings do for CCE in DVD-RB or RB-Opt. Then there are other things such as using reducing resolution for extras, which in turn reduces the bitrate requirement for encoding a clean image. I suppose you could even author a movie only DVD in DVD Shrink without any compression, then use DVD-RB to encode it down to size if the movie is that big (although I believe this is unsupported).

k-c-ksum
25th May 2004, 20:22
are you also re-encoding the extras?

how long is the main feature and how long are the extra's?
how much space is the menu taking up?

brashquido
26th May 2004, 00:45
Hi k-c-ksum,

For The Dish project I used the option to reduce the resolution of extras to try and keep the DVD as complete as I can. The extras in The Dish run almost as long as the movie (about 2.2 GB worth from memory), so by doing this RB-Opt is reporting that the bitrate is now about 2600 which is a good 37.5% increase over my first attempt, and should hopefully get decent results. Mind you I noticed there was a CCE error this morning before I went to work which I assume was some kind of problem with encoding the extras with the reduced resolution.

Wasn't looking so much for help for my particular project, but thought it be good if there was a general guide for people new to DVD backups on what to do when faced with backing up a DVD with a large amount of content.