A question and a problem

[auroauro]

Hi, first let me thank you for DVD-RB, it is the gratest program since tetris. One question and one problem:

-I was making a backup of the Last Samurai and after the preparation noticed the dv2 file did not have the forced film flag, looked at the movie with dvd2avi and if showed as NTSC at the first seconds but then it quickly locked to FILM. Is there any way to force DVD-RB to FILM on a given VTS ? Does this make a difference in the final quality of the backup ?

-I made a backup of the Beatles Anthology but the quality was very poor. Looked at the files and noticed the VBR average was very low, 815 in many cases, the movie is not that long, and all the mv2 files in D2VAVS did not add to 1.2GB, but the files in VIDEO_TS did add to 4.3 GB ?? I am enclosing some lines of the last item.ecl file that is very much like the others. I have all the files in case someone wants to find out what went wrong.

Thanks and regards;

Rafael

[item]
title=V01002600002016
aud_out=0
vaf_file=C:\D2VAVS\V01002600002016.vaf
aud_file=C:\D2VAVS\V01002600002016.mpa
file_focused=0
packet_size=2048
width=720
height=480
frame_rate_idx=1
cbr_brate=6000
vbr_brate_avg=815
vbr_brate_min=0
vbr_brate_max=7200
seq_endcode=0
dvd=0
half_width=0
half_height=0
lum_level=0
aspect_ratio=2
gop_m=3
gop_nm=4
gop_hdr=12
seq_hdr=1
all_closed_gop=0
fix_gop_length=0
samples_per_sec=44100
stereo=2
brate_idx=7
crc=1
progressive=0
alternate_scan=1
intra_dc_prec=2
aud_mode=0
tc_ref_frm=0
drop_frame=0
fix_vbv_delay=0
letter_box=0
pulldown_detect=0
offset_line=0
create_new_vaf=1
credits_tweak=0

[ShadowKnight]

I did the beatles anthology on OPV with undot().Deen().Fluxsmooth()
It came out awesome, and even better than the original clips in a lot of places, since it removed much of the "static".
I tried it with just undot().Deen() also, and it did a wonderful job as well, tho not as clean looking as it did with fluxsmooth as well. So, you may want to consider using those filters, at the very least to test with your own eyes (everyone has their own eyes when it comes to quality).
As for the NTSC/FILM problem, I think DVD-RB uses the flags from the original, and I dont think it will have a negative side effect if its not forced film, since it uses the original flags. Might want to get a second opinion on that tho, cause I'm not the dali-lama of DVD-RB or anything. Just constantly learning more about it, like most of us are :)

Any other opinions/facts, will be greatly appreciated, and I would love to read them as well.

[wmansir]

You don't have to worry about ForceFilm or %NTSC or any of that stuff. DVD-RB recreates the structure exactly as the original. To do this it uses a special .d2v mode that isn't like having FF on or off like a normal .d2v file. This is a custom mode that jdobbs wrote, although I recall Donald Graft saying he might make it available in future versions of DGDecode.

The reason your Anthology DVD came out so poor was probably because it used PCM audio, which takes up 3+ times the space of normal DD 5.1. That doesn't leave much room for the video, since the audio is kept untouched. This is a common situation for concert DVDs because PCM is regarded as having the highest sound quality of all the DVD audio formats, because it is uncompressed.

To verify this try opening your DVD in DVD Shrink and seeing how much space the audio tracks take up. It's probably quite a bit.

[TheSeeker]

Is it usually a good idea to use the filters undot().Deen().Fluxsmooth()? Just wondering if it was ok to use them on pretty much every movie or if there were only certain movies that the filters should be used? Or does this actually tend to degrade quality? Just looking for opinions...

[wmansir]

It does degrade quality to some extent. Fine detail will be lost, although it may not be visible depending on the source, display device, or the viewers eyes.

I wouldn't recommend using filters unless you are required to use a low bitrate (Below 3000kbps is a good cutoff for most material). At that point the presence of encoding artifacts like mosquito noise and blockiness become much more visible and distracting than the detail loss from light filter usage (IMO).

I would also recommend just sticking with undot.deen OR fluxsmooth, as the cumulative affect means even more video degradation. In the above case both may have been necessary due to the extremely low bitrate required and the poor quality of the source.

[TheSeeker]

Cool.. Thats pretty much what I figured. THanks.

[auroauro]

Thanks a lot wmansir and ShadowKnight.

The Beatles anthology does have PCM audio and it does use a LOT of space, I will try the backup without that track, if that does not work will try the filters.

Tnks also for the explanation on how DVD-RB does its magic, the backup copy of the Last Samurai did in fact looked excellent.

By the way, what is OPV ?

Regards;

[wmansir]

One Pass Video. DVD-RB tries to encode the video at constant quality (instead of a given bitrate) in one pass, but size is not guaranteed so the results could be over/undersized. It's not available with CCE Basic.