CloneDVD2 transcoder?

[skfields01]

I have a question for anyone who uses CloneDVD2 and might know the answer to this. When I have a DVD that is on my HDD (put there by DVDD) and I am going to use CloneDVD2 to split the movie onto 2 dics with 100% quality (meaning no compression)... sometimes in the "log file' I get the following message and sometimes I don't:

Target size sufficient. Transcoder disabled.

What is the transcoder? This is random and sometimes it is there and other times it isn't... even when the each disc is going to have only 3.8 gigs on it.

[Dimmer]

Transcoder is a thing inside CloneDVD (as well as DVD Shrink and other programs) that compresses video. If it says Transcoder disabled, it means it's not going to compress the video preserving 100% quality, because the selected material can fit onto one DVDR without compression. This message is not random at all; if you don't get it, this means CloneDVD will compress the video.

[skfields01]

That's what I thought, but here is an example:

Mystic River (36 Chapters = 7.3 gigs)

I am going to split it into 2 discs while keeping the menu system.

Disc 1: Chapter 1-18 (3.8 gig) with 100% on the bar
Disc 2: Chatper 19-36 (3.5 gig) with 100% on the bar

At this point it should say "Target size sufficient. Transcoding disabled" for both discs, but it doesn't... which means it is compressing. Why, since both discs are well under the limits.

[Dimmer]

Not sure about that particular DVD, but sometimes animated menus take over 500Mb and you're keeping it all on both discs, which means the total size of the two discs might be more than the size of the original.

But why do you care as long as it works. If you wish, click on the animated sheep while the program is working in order to switch to the transcoding diagram. You'll see a colorful picture showing whether it's actually transcoding anything.

[skfields01]

I am not a big fan of compression. I would rather split the discs. Plus any compression looks terrible on my 55 inch Mitsubishi HDTV.

It's weird though. With DVDFab and the above example... it does it perfectly and has no compression. I was just curious of why this would happen. I'll take a look at the graphs to see what is going on.