dvd rebuilder vs dvd shrink

[1Bullet]

I am only posting this question here because I don't no where to post it. I have been using dvd rebuilder with cce sp. I usually do 3 pass however, I have increased to 6 passes. I have also been experimenting with dvd shrink and the the encoding is 30 minutes rather than 12 hours. What is the quality differences between the two, that I should be looking for. Does differences only show up on high definition televisions or what? because I am having a problem seeing much difference.

[lark]

perhaps the 99th time this gets asked. did you try the search button?

regards
t :)

[feedback]

Shrink at 85%, I agree is hard to tell the difference. Where you will see the diff. is at the more aggressive Shrink levels.
With a 60% level and lower you will see a diff., just zoom in on the same frame one done with Shrink and one done by DVD-RB to verify. I believe you will retain more "I frames" with DVD-RB. Someone correct me if I am wrong on this thought.

Regards,
:)

[writersblock29]

@feedback

"I believe you will retain more "I frames" with DVD-RB."

Actually, DVD Rebuilder (using CCE or any other true encoder) creates entirely new I frames for its project, since it only uses the original as reference while encoding a completely new stream. DVD Shrink... depends on your settings. At default, DVD Shrink leaves I frames alone, and applies its compression to B (and, to a much lesser extent, P) frames. This allows more frames with high detail to sneak by, giving you better percieved quality than most other transcoders offer. "Smooth" or "Max Smooth" apply compression to all frames, which is why you lose detail as compared to the original -- yet tend to notice less macroblocking than what "Sharp" would have given you. Goes back to the "what's the difference between an encoder and a transcoder?" debate.

DVD Rebuilder can ALSO use the transcoder Rejig for its processing, so if THAT'S what you were refering to... you may be right; I've never used Rejig and am utterly unfamiliar with how it works as compared to Shrink.

[feedback]

@writersblock29

Yours is the better answer. You had it right in the first paragraph:)

"DVD Rebuilder (using CCE or any other true encoder) creates entirely new I frames for its project"

IMO if someone asks a question I will try to answer it to the best of my ability or at least point them in the right direction. We were all newbies once, some more recent than others:D
I hope these posts helped 1Bullet. He/She should let us know if they did.

Regards:goodpost:

[Fishman0919]

I did this a awhile ago

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=91418&highlight=blind+test

Edit: And what started this was a test I did with Movie Only between DVD-RB w/CCE Basic and DVD Shrink between 90% to 70% compression.... Again DVD-RB w/CCE Basic won

[SidDan]

I´ve tried DVD RB once with very nice results... but movies that have more than one titles in the VTS movie Titleset get to be a real pain inte arse when I had to use either Masetro or Scenarist to author the files back, since IFOedit won´t take more than one title into a titleset.

I couldn´t export a file from DVD RB for then to import it into Scenarist... can´t really remember why I couldn´t but it just wouldn´t. So I gave up on DVD RB at last since no one would help :/

[lark]

hmm, which version did you use? some bloody old one or...?

imho (somewhat recent versions of) dvd-rd have no problems with multiple titles?

and why would you like to import a rebuilt dvd into scenarist?

regards
t :)

[1Bullet]

All the above helped, I did notice a difference at about 85% compreesion ratio with DVD shrink. Usually I ripped out menu and extras and take movie only and all audio except 5.1, then video usally is not below 90% or I split the movie to discs. Anything below 90% with shrink I will be using DVD rebuilder. Thanks to all for helping me find the difference.

[SidDan]

Lark, well, it was like 1 year ago I used DVD RB, and at that time you had to author the dvd in Scenarist or DVD Maestro if there were more than 1 titles in titleset.

DVD RB wasn´t able to author the files back, but are you saying that it can now, and even with multiple of titles in a titleset?

[lark]

sure it can.
just give it a try and you'll be amazed what jdobbs has managed to pack into it in the meanwhile...

regards
t :)

[robot1]

Originally posted by SidDan
Lark, well, it was like 1 year ago I used DVD RB, and at that time you had to author the dvd in Scenarist or DVD Maestro if there were more than 1 titles in titleset.

DVD RB wasn´t able to author the files back, but are you saying that it can now, and even with multiple of titles in a titleset? From the very first public beta (0.14) DVD-RB has never needed Scenarist or Maestro.
Probably the first releases had problems, but jdobbs wrote DVD-RB to avoid the usage (and the complexity) of those programs.
Are you sure you used DVD-RB, or other software like DVD2SVCD or DVD2DVD-R, or just the Big3 Method ?

[TECK]

1Bullet, is what you're after... quality or speed.
If the answer is Quality, then use DVD-RB Pro (you made a donation, right? :)). If you look for speed, then use DVD Shrink.

I'm a "Main Movie Only" guy because I hate all the extra bling-blings that a normal DVD have.
I use this simple rule:
100% to 90% compression > DVD Shrink
89% compression or less > DVD-RB Pro + CCE

Even at 85% compression, if you have a good TV, you will still notice the difference, when you use DVD-RB instead of Shrink.

Regarding the passes, it's crazy to do a set of 6 passes.
First, it's a waist of time and second, over 3 passes CCE will actually deteriorate the movie quality, instead of improving it.

I'll post my own CCE rules:
89% to 50% compression > 2 passes
50% compression and less > 3 passes

DVD-RB have the ability to let you insert your own Avisynth script, which is a great help for the movie. Some people say "Why use filters? I don't like complicated things...". Well, first because you're increasing the amount of compression compared to the original DVD and second because you're removing the film noise.
On top of that, I also use the new 64bit Floating Point AVS option. It's slower but makes a big difference at the end.

My DVD-RB AVS NTSC settings, for any movie:
All default, except...
AudioDub(BlankClip()) > unchecked
Filter Editor > Undot()
iDCT=3 (64bit Floating Point checked)

Give it a try and remember that nothing replaces your own experiences and tests.
The best way is to rip a small portion of the movie (few seconds), DVD Shrink can do this in a snap.
Then, play with it and try few filters, until you obtain the best results for your eye.
A script example of the last movie I encoded:Lanczos4Resize(720,464,66,48,588,380)
AddBorders(0,8,0,8)
Undot()It was Star Wars 4 (don't we all want to pull the old DVD's out, since episode 3 came out? :)), compressed at 58%.

I hope my post will answer few of your questions.
Cheers and happy encoding. :)

[valnar]

I use both... at the same time. :D

DVD Decrypter first, of course.

I use DVD Shrink to compress the menus and if needed, remove some audio tracks. Then I use DVD Rebuilder to compress the rest of the movie with CCE. Sometimes I'll use DVD Remake Pro to remove unwanted extras or FBI warnings.

I've used almost all the tools on these boards over the years, but it only comes down to these four for me now. A lot of great work has been done and I'm truly thankful.

Robert

[Jack'n'xbox]

Hey that’s a good idea but should you not do it dvdrb first then shrink to get rid of the unneeded material. Of the two, dvdrb it the better (but longer) encoder. So if you run it though shrink first, is not dvdrb working with an inferior master?

Please correct me as I have only used shrink but now working with dvdrb.

Thanks for the info.

[Chetwood]

Of the two, dvdrb it the better (but longer) encoder. So if you run it though shrink first, is not dvdrb working with an inferior master?

Please correct me as I have only used shrink but now working with dvdrb.


First of all DVD Shrink is a transcoder not an encoder, meaning it only recompresses already known vectors on a macroblock level which makes it a lot faster than any encoder. If you insist on using DVDRB you can of course use DVD Shrink first to strip unwanted audio/subtitle streams/titles (re-author), keeping the original quality by using a target size of 9 GB or something so it does not apply any compression. Rest assured there's absolutely no point in setting up percentage rules like

100% to 90% compression > DVD Shrink
89% compression or less > DVD-RB Pro + CCE

because as blutach put it in this thread (http://forum.digital-digest.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=45129):


For example, if a movie was originally encoded with a "high" bit rate (say 6 Mbps - "mega bits per second") and compressed by a lot, (say to 50%), on average, this would result in a bitrate of 3 MBps.

But if the movie was originally encoded with a "low" bitrate (say 3.5 Mbps) and was compressed only by 20% (to 80%), the resulting average bitrate would be 2.8 Mbps -- worse than the 50% compression!!!


So compression percentage has no meaning whatsoever, simply because you don't know what source bitrate it is applied to so you won't know what target bitrate is achieveable. Better use a bitrate calculator to estimate those.

What it boils down to between DVD Shrink and DVD RB or any other tool for that matter is this: does the (minor, remember Shrink's AEC settings) improvement in quality really justify the amount of extra work and especially time? To check this out for yourself take a certain movie, decide on what streams/titles you wanna keep and rip it to DVD-R with both DVD Shrink, DVD Rebuilder and watch it on the same TV set and decide what you prefer. Easy as that.

[Jack'n'xbox]

Well. It’s testing time. I think it’s the only way to end the debate (for me at least). So I got my hands on dvdrb, (tried setting it up but it seems that it only works with CCE) and a bit calculator now the CCE is a bit tough, “$2000.00” for software is way out my league. I found a demo but the download page says that there’s a logo put on the file/film, will I see this logo then the DVD is played in my stand-alone player? And are there limitations to said software i.e. time or file size? Or should I just use another Encoder? A free one like QuEnc would be nice.

As for shrink I have now started playing with the re_auther and found that it limits the menu functionality, is there a work around for this, I would like to keep the language selection of English and French. I’m also playing with Start/End frame times all in the goal to limit the amount of compression needed.

Again friends,
I thank you for your time and understanding.
Jacknxbox :thanks:

[Chetwood]

As for shrink I have now started playing with the re_auther and found that it limits the menu functionality, is there a work around for this, I would like to keep the language selection of English and French.

And why is that? Any remote for standalones comes with a language/audio key that lets you swap between languages during playback without having to fiddle your way through a menu. You can even do a right-click on the selected stream in the left re-author pane and choose what language to be played back when you play the DVD. IMO it doesn't get any easier than that.

[Jack'n'xbox]

Yes your right, Sorry It was the menu button on the remote that didn’t work. As for shrink it did pretty good almost no compression.

But with the dvdrb I’m getting some hang-ups. I set up my dvdrb and followed the guide in the pages of this site. I do complete the prepare mode but as soon as I start encode mode I get this log


[14:27:00] Phase II ENCODING started
- Creating M2V for VTS_02 segment 0
-- Encoding resulted in no .M2V, retrying.
- Creating M2V for VTS_02 segment 0
-- Encoding resulted in no .M2V, retrying.
- Creating M2V for VTS_02 segment 0
[14:32:32] Phase II ENCODING started
- Creating M2V for VTS_02 segment 0
-- Encoding resulted in no .M2V, retrying.
- Creating M2V for VTS_02 segment 0
-- Encoding resulted in no .M2V, retrying.
- Creating M2V for VTS_02 segment 0

Any one knows what’s up?

Doohh! I just saw a thread that refers to this same problem after a search.. I will repost in it later on tonight with a complete log

Sorry

[feedback]

@Jack'n'xbox


So I got my hands on dvdrb, (tried setting it up but it seems that it only works with CCE)

Or should I just use another Encoder? A free one like QuEnc would be nice.

DVD-RB comes with QuEnc. encoder and works well with it. You can also use HC encoder.

Regards,:)

[Jack'n'xbox]

I put in cce and It's great. The setup guild in the forum dvdrb is better then the one in the guilds stection of this site, it's up to date.

[Tube]

Well, first of...Shrink does the work with shrinking the size of animated menus, on some disks they can be enormous. For instance Lord of the Ring, the menu itself was nearly 1Gb..wow. Leave the rest untouched, ie. no compression. Then run it through DVD-Remake Pro to get rid of unwanted audio tracks, as well as some unwanted extras and when you're at it..disable unwanted buttons in menus.

Finaly run it through DVD-RB Pro, and CCE to get the final size to fit on disk. Then the debate can go on about passes and other tweaks, but more than 4 passes seems to be just a waste of time and electricity bills.

[valnar]

What Tube says is correct. This is the best way (for quality) to remake a DVD. "Shrink" the menus, remove crap with DVD Remake and send it through DVD Rebuilder with CCE. Sometimes I send it back through DVD Shrink again with no compression as it properly removes audio track pointers to audio tracks you've already removed. DVD Rebuilder doesn't always do that correctly.

Robert

[feedback]

Don't pre-process your source unless you know, absolutely, what you are doing and Don't submit any problems with that kind of sources.
This is from the Help section of DVD-Rebuilder.

I thought I might add this quote Just for those Newbies that don't take the time to read the Help file.

Regards,:)

[Tube]

True =)

But we know what we are doing, don't we?

[feedback]

Yep! ;)

[Dimad]

Just to add another preprocessing option (only for those who know what they are doing of course :D ) whyle the disk is loaded into DvdReMake : convert menus to still (available since v3.1).

[Tube]

Thoose nice animated menus, wouldn't that be a shame :)

[writersblock29]

I LOVE having to watch five minutes of menu before a "play" button appears! Oh, and who can forget those nice commercials that sometimes appear once "play" is selected, just before the movie starts? Plus, it's such a bonus to have a notice from the FBI spring up and threaten you. Man, what your money can BUY this day 'n age!

You make a pretty darned good piece of software, Dimad. Since day one, I've loved using it! Never had it interfer with Rebuilder, Shrink, or Recode, either!

...Looks kind of like this thread said what it needed to say, dunnut?

[Dimad]

I LOVE having to watch five minutes of menu before a "play" button appears! Oh, and who can forget those nice commercials that sometimes appear once "play" is selected, just before the movie starts? Plus, it's such a bonus to have a notice from the FBI spring up and threaten you. Man, what your money can BUY this day 'n age!

:D :D :D


You make a pretty darned good piece of software, Dimad. Since day one, I've loved using it! Never had it interfer with Rebuilder, Shrink, or Recode, either!

Thanks.

[Mr. Monte]

Dimad's the Wizard :)

[TheSeeker]

Dimad's the Wizard :)

Yea I dont know what I would do without my copy of DVDRemake. Absolutely vital tool IMO.

To those wondering about Shrink/recode/IC/whatever vs. DVD Rebuilder and an encoder... If you ever plan on getting a halfway decent tv (E.g. an HDTV or plasma or whatever), take the time and do your movies with an encoder. If you do them with ANY transcoder and then go to watch them on a decent tv, they look horrid!! Trust me you will just be going back and redoing all your dvd's if you dont do them right right now.

[phædrus]

I had a question about reencoding versus transcoding, and this thread seems like as good a place as any to ask it.

I have been playing with DVD Shrink for a few months now, and I'm thinking of downloading and learning to use DVD-RB with CCE. Usually I strip everything out except the main movie and the main soundtrack to lessen the need for "shrinkage." Usually I use the smooth or extra smooth options on Shrink, with deep analysis. Quality is more important to me than time. On TV episode DVDs, I usually shrink only three episodes onto a 4.7G DVD instead of four for example.

I wonder how a reencoder handles hybrid material. I am not using DVD2SVCD anymore, but when I was using that with CCE there is a setting for progressive frames or leaving it interlaced. If it is progressive, then you have to use IVTC on many sources to get the smoothest possible picture. With a hybrid DVD, you have some parts that are interlaced, and some are progressive. How will DVD-RB handle that? Do we go back to the headaches we had trying to encode Star Trek TNG to progressive AVI files, or can DVD Rebuilding be done with more finesse? I mean, does the encoder switch back and forth from interlaced to progressive frames just like on the original DVD?

Enquiring minds want to know.

[Chetwood]

Enquiring minds want to know.

So why they don't just give it a try? It's repeatedly been stated on this forums that acceptable quality lies in the eyes of the beholder so you best bet to find out what works for you is give it a try. Personally I don't see no sense in using CCE on DVDs and even if it would look a bit besser I wouldn't wanna waste the extra time on it. Being that concerned with quality I'd rip to dual layer or 2 blanks per movie.

[TheSeeker]

I had a question about reencoding versus transcoding, and this thread seems like as good a place as any to ask it.

I have been playing with DVD Shrink for a few months now, and I'm thinking of downloading and learning to use DVD-RB with CCE. Usually I strip everything out except the main movie and the main soundtrack to lessen the need for "shrinkage." Usually I use the smooth or extra smooth options on Shrink, with deep analysis. Quality is more important to me than time. On TV episode DVDs, I usually shrink only three episodes onto a 4.7G DVD instead of four for example.

I wonder how a reencoder handles hybrid material. I am not using DVD2SVCD anymore, but when I was using that with CCE there is a setting for progressive frames or leaving it interlaced. If it is progressive, then you have to use IVTC on many sources to get the smoothest possible picture. With a hybrid DVD, you have some parts that are interlaced, and some are progressive. How will DVD-RB handle that? Do we go back to the headaches we had trying to encode Star Trek TNG to progressive AVI files, or can DVD Rebuilding be done with more finesse? I mean, does the encoder switch back and forth from interlaced to progressive frames just like on the original DVD?

Enquiring minds want to know.


DVD RB reconstructs the video stream (flags and all) exactly as it appears in the original. So to your question. Yes dvd rb can handle hybrid sources with relative ease. And I would say that if your that concerned about quality use CCE with DVD RB. The way I figure it is that with Shrink it takes about 30 to 45 minutes all told right? With CCE RB on my setup it takes about 2 hours. So it takes a bit longer, but the quality is so much better that its not even comparable. If you have a little bit better tv then the choice is a no brainer. Because for me, on my tv, I can totally tell the movie that I did with shrink compared to the movies I did with cce. THe shrink ones are much softer, much less detail, and many more blockies. Its worth the extra time. Even if you dont have a big tv now, if you plan on getting one in the future, its good to start doing the encodes right, right now. Otherwise your going to want to go back and redo all those dvd's you did with Shrink.

@Chetwood,

What you dont want to spend an extra hour or hour and a half to get decent quality backups? Of course its your perogative but IMO its worth every second to do it right.

[Chetwood]

Like I said before: I doubt it that it's that much of a difference in quality espceially when only moderate compression in Shrink is applied and AEC settings are used (ever tried that?). I'll be testing my rips on a friend's beamer soon, on my 28'' my rips look perfect.

[TheSeeker]

Like I said before: I doubt it that it's that much of a difference in quality espceially when only moderate compression in Shrink is applied and AEC settings are used (ever tried that?). I'll be testing my rips on a friend's beamer soon, on my 28'' my rips look perfect.

Your kidding right? Of course I have tried AEC settings. I used Shrink religously for a long time. Your correct in that if the compression ratio is small (or rather the change in bitrates is small) then Shrink could possibly be even better because of the way Transcoders work, the video stream would be closer to the original. But this is only with very small compression. If you have a movie that needs to be compressed a decent amount, then Shrink just doesn't hold up. For example, try backing up a tv series (where the whole 7 to 8 gbs is all movie) or try backing up a 3 hour movie with shrink and you will guaranteed see a difference. Or even try backing up a 2 hour movie that uses the whole 8 gbs. To be sure Shrink is a very very fast and very very simple tool to use. That alone makes it a very popular program for the casual user. But to say it beats the quality of CCE is a bit of a stretch. Sure your encodes look great on your 28" interlaced tv. My shrink encodes did too. Until I got a 46" toshiba hdtv. And then I was cursing the fact that I would have to go back and re encode all my high action/longer/tv series movies. It wasnt much fun. But by all means, use whatever you wish.

[phædrus]

Chetwood, my question was not about quality per se (which is a personal judgment) but about the way DVD RB handled the DVD data. That was of primary importance to me, because I did not want to go back to jerky hybrid videos like the old progressive AVI backups. As far as quality goes, I know Shrink introduces some softness at moderate compression ratios, but I haven't been really dissatisfied. If I see a lot of blocks, I will go to two discs. But if I could get super high quality results, I wouldn't care if it took six hours to backup a DVD. We all have to sleep sometime anyway, don't we?

TheSeeker has convinced me that on long movies and TV show discs it is advisable to go to DVD RB, because with Shrink the quality really suffers badly on that type of material, even with the deep analysis and smooth options. I tried that once on a Babylon 5 DVD, and was not a happy camper.

Thank you for your input. It has been very helpful. I will test out DVD RB very soon.

[writersblock29]

@phædrus

I have to agree with BOTH Chetwood and The Seeker on several points. To Chetwood, I have to agree that quality's where you find it -- and everyone finds it in different areas. I still have many Shrink-produced backups that look just fine on an HDTV... but, now, if Rebuilder's creator, Jdobbs, were sitting next to me watching the same program... would he agree? Would you? Hard to say, that.

But I also agree wholeheartedly with The Seeker when it comes to long movies, episode disks, or those pesky Pixar/Disney titles that are jam-packed and full of material. CCE (or HC, which compares quite well to CCE and is also supported by DVD Rebuilder) rarely ever lets you down. I also like how I can edit the avs scripts to add filters if my original's pretty grainy -- you'd be surprised how many of my copies look better than the originals... and that's something I can't do with Shrink.

If you tend to do movie-only copies for feature films, in my opinion it's only worth using Rebuilder if either your movie is long or a lot of reduction from the original stream needs to take place. I know some will argue with that... but we're really only proving Chetwood's point: beauty is in the eye of the beholder. To THIS beholder, that's my input.