45 min. vs. 5 hours.

[n3rdyguy]

I was converting StarGate Season 7 vol. 2 yesterday.

Everything went acording to plan,I think.. No errors reported. It took about 5 hours to convert on my small inferiour machine, using CCE SP 2.67.x.x.x....

Only nack I noticed, I had previously done a DVD Shrink encode, which took about 45 min. and the quality of that was almost exactly like the CCE encode.

So, I ask, why not just use DVD Shrink, there's no difference in quality anyway!


- Maybe there's some settings I've missed that left out the quality.. lol.

[NaN]

If your post is seriously meant, I can just recommend use whatever suits you best. Don't forget image quality lies in the eye of the observer, however it may make a difference wether you watch your dvds on a small display or on a large tv-set...

But honestly, your post looks a lot like an attempt to start a flame war. Don't.

Cheers, NaN

[TheSeeker]

Your only really going to see the difference in quality between a transcoder and an encoder when your performing heavy compression (say 70% or less of original). At least thats about the cut off line for me. Otherwise some blocking can occur, especially in high action scenes. But if you dont care and are probably never going to get a bigger hdtv or something then by all means use Shrink for everything.

[n3rdyguy]

Thanks for your replies.
Here's what DVDRB says:

- Reduction Level for DVD-5: 56,0%

Maybe it's because there's not much action scenes on this dvd. There's much dark, and steady movie..

I was not attempting to start any flame, I really like DVD-RB, I was actually thinking of such a program, when suddenly it popped up here on doom9's forum. That said, I've never had ANY problems with this program, it works like a charm, only about 4,5 hours encoding, without moving a finger!! It can be done faster, however my machine isn't that great (1700+ 512mb pc2100).

I am not any good at explaining myself, and this could proberly look alot like a bad post, for that I am sorry..

If nothing more is to be discussed here (regarding quality and stuff), I shall be silent, yet again.

[Numer0bis]

When you compress a film really heavy, for example star wars episode 2 ;) then you can see a differnce between cce and other transcoders like CloneDVD2 oder DVDshrink. You will get some blockness, as he described above

[pg55555]

Although most people talk about compression ratios I think the real parameter should be bitrates.

So, for movies with good bitrate to start with say above 8000 bps, a 70% reduction would provide a bitrate of 5600 bps, which should produce excellent backups with any encoder/transcoder.

But if you start with a DVD source with a 3 hr. video and three 5+1 audios plus extras and menues, it is possible you source average bitrate is below 5000 bps. So a 70% compression would mean a bitrate of 3500 bps. At this level things start to become interesting :) , and it is where encoders as CCE or Procoder show their advantages.

Regarding your 5 hours encoding time, how many encoding passes are you performing? It is arguably that doing more than 2 passes (1+1) in CCE is not worth the time, specially if your alternative for saving time is Shrink

[Numer0bis]

yeah it has to do with bitrates, but you can also get a good looking movie with low bitraes. My Star Wars episode 2 backup was done with a average bitrate of 3290 kbit/s. I just told CEE to distribute the bitrate more like vbr instead of cbr, by lowering bias settings in dvd-rebuilder. So you even can get a good looking backup, when the movie is extremley long. With long movies I especially recommend the using of cee 2.67.xx.x rather than 2.5. I encoeded it twice and could see a difference in some action scenes, where 2.5 delivered some blockness and 2.67.xx not.

[n3rdyguy]

Originally posted by pg55555
Although most people talk about compression ratios I think the real parameter should be bitrates.

So, for movies with good bitrate to start with say above 8000 bps, a 70% reduction would provide a bitrate of 5600 bps, which should produce excellent backups with any encoder/transcoder.

But if you start with a DVD source with a 3 hr. video and three 5+1 audios plus extras and menues, it is possible you source average bitrate is below 5000 bps. So a 70% compression would mean a bitrate of 3500 bps. At this level things start to become interesting :) , and it is where encoders as CCE or Procoder show their advantages.

Regarding your 5 hours encoding time, how many encoding passes are you performing? It is arguably that doing more than 2 passes (1+1) in CCE is not worth the time, specially if your alternative for saving time is Shrink

DVD-RB is set to standard, 2 passes with CCE. I am using v2.67.00.23+ECLCCE.

This is from the log-file:
- Reduction Level for DVD-5: 56,0%
- Overall Bitrate : 2.608Kbs
- Space for Video : 3.789.324KB
- HIGH/LOW/AVERAGE Cell Bitrates: 3.084/393/2.608 Kbs


I've looked at it again, I really think DVD Shrink made it better than CCE.. CCE's is all blocky. Maybe there was some setting I missed??

It's NTSC and Interlaced (I think)..

[Trahald]

Yeah.. % compression is usually an easy indicator , but compressability is very important.. even a factor could be if the original encode is very motion optimised then quantizer adjusting would result in a very good output. cce's benefit is it is free to revisit motion and quantizer.. usually resulting in a better result.

another possible factor is that dvdrb doesnt do menus.. so in a disk with a medium to large menu, dvdrb would have to compress the main movie a higher % than dvd shrink would since shrink would use the space it gained compressing the menu to give the main movie a higher %.

Originally posted by n3rdyguy
I've looked at it again, I really think DVD Shrink made it better than CCE.. CCE's is all blocky. Maybe there was some setting I missed??

It's NTSC and Interlaced (I think)..

cool then use dvdshrink.

[lamster]

Originally posted by Trahald
another possible factor is that dvdrb doesnt do menus.. so in a disk with a medium to large menu, dvdrb would have to compress the main movie a higher % than dvd shrink would
Note that when I encounter a movie that uses hundreds of megabytes or more for menus, I usually run it through Shrink to compress just the menus (not touching anything else), then run it through DVD-RB to strip unwanted audio streams and compress the non-menu VOBs.

[J-Wo]

interesting discussion... I just stripped the extras off of Underworld R1 and am left with a movie that only needs to be compressed 90%. In that case would it be safe to use shrink instead? And for such a small compression, what are the recommended shrink settings? Deep Analysis? AEC compression? Thanks guys!

[nwg]

Juts use Shrink with Deep Analysis. The AEC quality settings won't get activated with that amount of low compression (it really only work with about 75% and below).

[luders]

I have been out of the game for a while pretty much never dealing with shrink types of software until DVD Shrink 3.2

I just did two different projects of turning the 2 disc Return of the King Extended to 1 dual layer disc, just keeping the main movie and main sound track.

I used DVD Shrink by ripping each disc with no compression and only ripping the main movie and sound then I pulled both discs titles from the hard drive back into Shrink to compile one dual layer disc. The compression was 80 percent of original. The fact that you can use one program to do that was fantastic and only took like 1 hour.

I also did it the longer way using some new and old tools.
AviSynth 2.5
DGIndex (Formally DVD2AVI)
Maestro
CCE 2.5
ChapterExtractor

Here I used "forced film" because I could find no errors in this case. Here is my AviSynth script:

LoadPlugin("C:\Program Files\AviSynth 2.5\plugins\DGDecode.dll")
LoadPlugin("C:\Program Files\AviSynth 2.5\plugins\Decomb521.dll")
v=mpeg2source("rotk1.d2v")
a=wavsource("rotk1 AC3 T01 3_2ch 448Kbps DELAY 0ms.wav")
audiodub(v,a)
#FieldDeinterlace()
ConvertToYUY2
LanczosResize(704,480)

I make a WAV of the audio just to work with, it is not necessary of course since the AC3 is going into the final project.

I could find no need for the deinterlacing so I ended up not using it. I did a 2 pass CCE run that took about 6 hours.
One thing I did, that I dont understand why people dont do more often in compressing a dvd project, is use a lower resolution dvd standard. 704x480 works great. This way you dedicate those valuable bits to less space. Long story short. The CCE version does look better but I cant say it is enough to be worth the trouble. I dont mind at all because I think it is fun but DVD Shrink has definetly earned my respect.

[jdobbs]

This is definitely getting OT...

[n3rdyguy]

Thanks for all your replies everyone.

I am now convinced that CCE does a better job with more compression. I have done a few more discs of StarGate and DVD Shrink don't even get close to the quality of a 3 pass CCE. It takes a while (about 7 hours), but it looks great.


Now someone close this thread ;)

[dannyv]

Originally posted by n3rdyguy
Thanks for all your replies everyone.

I am now convinced that CCE does a better job with more compression. I have done a few more discs of StarGate and DVD Shrink don't even get close to the quality of a 3 pass CCE. It takes a while (about 7 hours), but it looks great.


Now someone close this thread ;)

I must agree. I did a test on star trek DS9 season 1 and the original quality stinks to begin with. It seems blury and out of focus. I did it with shrink and the results were that it was even more blury and out of focus but also blocky. Then I did it with dvd-rb and it came out just as good as the original except that the edges seem sharper. So my conclsion is if you have a very big project with bad quality to begin with the only solution is DVD-RB.

[n3rdyguy]

I just did another stargate dvd in RB. I don't know much about video encoding, but almost every scene change (not chapter..), it makes a kind of zigzag noise. Very annoying. Is there some hidden setting to get rid of that??