What am I missing (quality)?

[spartanstew]

OK, 1 month of so ago I heard about this product and came here to give it a try. I use dvddcrypter and dvdshrink for most of my back-ups, but since I have a HT and a 126" screen, quality really matters and there's some movies that I just don't back-up because the quality suffers (long movies, action movies, dts). I figured I would give DVD-RB a try. I went ahead and paid for the pro version, but downloaded the free one to test out. I also downloaded any other tools I'd need (using QuEnc). My first back-up attempt was The Fifth Element SB. I had tried it before with Shrink/Decrypter and blocking was evident. I realize that bitrate isn't a great indicator, but the original FE SB had an average bitrate of 7.9 and the copy I had made with shrink/decrypter had an average bitrate of 3.9. So, I went through the whole process of using DVD-RB and succesfully burned a new version of the movie. I went to watch it on my big screen and almost immediately saw some blocking and pixelization. When I put the disc back in my computer to check the bitrate it showed as 4.1.
Needless to say I was quite disappointed that the lengthy process had hardly improved PQ at all. After this, I forgot all about DVD-RB and went back to just backing up "easy" movies with Shrink/Decrypter.
Over the last month I've received a few DVD-RB Pro updates in my Email. I never even used the first Pro version I was sent, because I didn't like the free version. Curiousity got the better of me and finally yesterday I downloaded the latest Pro version and decided to try again. The movie this time is contact. I had just burned this movie 2 days ago with Shrink/Decrypter and didn't really like the result. Again you could see some pixelation and the average bit rate was 3.97.
Last night I used the DVD-RB and let it run overnight (1 click option). This morning I used ImgTools and burned a new copy with Decrypter. The result is the same as what I found before. I can tell No difference between the copy I made with Shrink/Decrypter and the copy I made with DVD-RB Pro/Decrypter. Both have some pixelation and the average bitrate on the newer disc actually dropped to 3.28 which leads me to believe that the new copy is even worse than the previous copy.

What am I doing wrong? Is it possible to back up movies like the Lord of the Rings with this program and not see any degredation when viewed on a 126" screen (that shows everything)? If, so, how?



Stew

[jdobbs]

If you can't tell the difference between DVD-RB and Shrink -- there is something terribly wrong. If you really want to get the most out of DVD-RB, I would suggest you use CCE (Basic is fairly cheap at $58). But as I assume you want to keep the cost down, you may want to try using HC encoder. QuEnc is a good encoder, but I think HC will do better for you at lower bitrates. In most cases it is faster as well.

HC is installed for you when you use the DVD-RB Pro installer.

Please report back and let me know what you find. Also, don't take bitrate numbers too seriously... the same bitrate can get dramatically different results depending upon the encoder/transcoder.

[Rockas]

... And you should get rid of the DTS :)
Are you making FULL DVD backups with Rebuilder and Shrink?
Or... you are doing Movie only with Shrink and Full on Rebuilder (freeware version only allows you to do full DVD but the Pro gives you some more choices)?

[feedback]

I agree with Rockas. If you are using DTS get rid of it, because what good is great sound when the movie has pixelization.

Are you doing movie only?

Additionally, DVD Rebuilder Pro. now has a blanking feature in the "Video Segment Viewer/Editor" that you can use on some or all of the extras. You can slideshow the credits with it also. All this, of course, gives you more room for the main movie.

I personally like the HC encoder, give it a try. It gives great results.

Another thing that one is able to do that may be of interest to you is having the ability to use various Matrices with the extras that one keeps.

There are the matrices that come with DVD-RB Pro. in the "Advanced/Expert Options" that are recommended by approx. bitrate. for example " Medium_High (3200-4000)".
There is also an addon called "DVD Rebuilder Matrix Editor" (a seperate freeware Download) that gives one the chance to try a different Matrix on a segment to get an idea of what the final movie is going to look like without having to wait for an entire encode.

Well, anyway, we have had posters with screens as big as in a drive-in movie theater use DVD-Rebuilder Pro. and have had nothing but praise for the application.
So, I guess like so many others that post here you don't have something working as it should.

Regards,:)

[k2002rahmani]

I would recommend getting CCE Basic or CCE SP Trial

[Jester700]

I like CCE basic, but I have to say that if I didn't like DVD-RB already, I wouldn't spend money on CCE without first doing an encode with HC to see if it's worth it. I think HC will give a good indication of how good this kind of encoding can do, and if that's not good enough with his video rig, I don't think CCE will help that much.

I do find it odd that it seems no better than shrink. Even if RB isn't good enough on that big screen, it should STILL be visibly better than shrink.

[spartanstew]

Second attempt:

I burned a copy of Alien last night with Decrypter and Shrink. I copied the whole disc with the exception of the dts track. Next I copied the same movie using DVD-RB and Decrypter. I used the movie and menu only option, but I kept the dts. I realize that this scews the results a bit, but I enjoy dts and wanted to see what RB could do. This time I used HC as was suggested. Total time with RB was 6.5 hours.
This afternoon, I invited my wife and a friend into the HT to do a blind study on all 3 discs (Shrink, RB, real). For this test, I went right to scene 3 for all three. If you remember scene 3, you'll know why I like to use it. It starts out black, then gets to bright white. It also has a lot of detail and shadows in the background. Even the real movie does not look great on this scene.
First I put in the RB disc (but neither of them knew which disc it was). The first thing we noticed was some skipping. I played about 3 minutes of the scene and the disc stuttered/skipped 5-6 times. I told them to ignore the skips and focus on the quality. As soon as the bay doors opened you could see the pixelation and fuzziness in the background.
Next I put on the real disc and it, of course, looked good. Nobody made any comments, just watched.
Next I put on the Shrink disc. It didn't skip or stutter, but my friend and my wife both noticed that there was an extreme amount of EE on most of the images.

When I stopped the final disc, my wife said "Obviously, disc #2 is the real disc. The quality was a little better on the first over the third, but still nowhere near the actual quality and the skipping was very bothersome. But since the quality was slightly better on #1 over #3, I'd say #1 is the new burn method and #3 is Shrink". My friend concurred. Obviously, they were both correct on all counts.
I don't know what I'm doing wrong, as I would think that if I was doing something wrong that I'd get an error and the actual burn would fail. ON that end, however, I'm having no problems. I use the one click option at night and in the morning I use Img which then automatically uses decrypter to burn it.
I can't figure out why it was skipping, but even if it wasn't skipping the quality was still nowhere near the original. I guess I could have skipped the dts track and tried it that way, but one of the things I'm searching for is a way to get a great copy without having to remove one of the main audio tracks. Sometimes I like the dts better.
Anyway, jdobbs asked me to report back, so these are my findings. I doubt if I'll try again as the process is just too long to keep playing with. As it is, I have back-ups of 75% of my collection already. It's just the final 25% of movies I won't be able to back up. Money well spent for the learning process anyway. Up until about 6 months ago, all I knew how to do on a computer was check Email.



Stew

[jdobbs]

I don't have a clue what is going on. Skips and stutters, pixelation, -- something is wrong. But I don't know what it is either. I can only tell you that I've never gotten stutter, and that on my 50" Sony WEGA the difference between a disc done with DVD-RB and Shrink is like night and day.

Anyway -- thanks for the input.

[SAPSTAR]

A question : What is the size of your screen ?!? On small screens, you can't really tell the difference between shrink and any other method.......
Something else : Do you keep the whole DVD or do you only encode the main movie ??? (If the compression ratio is over 80%, even DVD shrink can make it !!!)

[jdobbs]

He says in the first post that his screen is 126 inches. There's something else going on here. The skipping is a clue...

[Jester700]

My skipping problems were usually cheap media and/or pushing the media above its limits. One other issue was a known RB bug that was fixed - I forget what it was, but it only happened once.

Bottom line, an a screen that big I would use RB and trim as much as possible. Personally, I would never keep a DTS track.

[k2002rahmani]

RB does not seem to be the problem here.

CHEAP MEDIA, CHEAP BURNER, or SPEED PROBLEMS.

I have a thread somewhere here with similar problems on my 108" HT screen. Skipping and stuttering were very annoying and frequent. I was using 16x Verbatim media (which I believe to be very good) and a good NEC 16x burner. The problem? I was burning the discs at around 13-15x. Now, I burn at 2.4x or 4x. Perfect burns, every time. I suggest you try this.

[Wishbringer]

RB does not seem to be the problem here.

CHEAP MEDIA, CHEAP BURNER, or SPEED PROBLEMS.

I have a thread somewhere here with similar problems on my 108" HT screen. Skipping and stuttering were very annoying and frequent. I was using 16x Verbatim media (which I believe to be very good) and a good NEC 16x burner. The problem? I was burning the discs at around 13-15x. Now, I burn at 2.4x or 4x. Perfect burns, every time. I suggest you try this.

But then he should have the same problem with Shrink.
I would think, that someting is totally misconfigured in your RB ini.

Just did a recode of FE and quality was nearly the same as original.
(Ok, used RemoveGrain and EQM V3LR too).

[Jester700]

What do you burn with when you use shrink? The shrink burner? Do you use a different prog to burn RB stuff? I'd look into that as well.

[Rockas]

DVD Shrink doesn' burn.

You either make it use Nero or DVD Decrypter.

[k2002rahmani]

Before everything else: does the disc stutter/skip on your computer or only standalone? Have you tried other players? If only on standalones, I would look into media and burn speed again, regardless of the outcome in shrink.

But, here's a better idea. Use CCE SP 2.7 Trial (download it from the CCE site). It will have the CCE logo in the bottom after you're done, but that's insignificant right now. Remove every DVD-RB folders, including the rebuilder.ini, and then run the package installer for RC4. Use the CCE & ProCoder Configuration to select CCE SP 2.7 Trial and indicate the paths. Start DVD-RB. Choose the source, destination and working paths, Movie and Menu only, remove all languages except English, and kill the DTS track as well (It is close to impossible to differentiate between Dolby And DTS unless the makers used a different track to record each. They are just different codecs, so even though Dolby is more "lossy" and DTS is a bigger file, they are not apples and apples. If both are recorded using the same mix, they will sound the same in most cases. Do a "Dolby vs. DTS" Google search if you don't believe me.)

I would go up to Options>CCE Options>Advanced Expert Settings, and raise the VBR pass to 4. This will take about 3 hours as opposed to the 5 hours you mentioned above. After this, watch it on your computer, and it will look perfect. From there, I personally use ImgTool to make an ISO and Decrypter on 2.4x to burn. Good luck!

[laserfan]

If you can't tell the difference between DVD-RB and Shrink -- there is something terribly wrong....I don't know what to make of this. I've used Shrink down to 70% compression and it looks OK to me, as good as the original. One long, difficult movie I shrunk from DL disc to SL was Collateral and it looked fine also on my 60" Sony HDTV.

Is there a compression level at which RB-Pro clearly outshines Shrink? Or maybe someone can recommend a couple of DVD sequences (jdobbs or someone who uses difficult scenes for testing) that will show-up the differences for me (I know how to choose a custom compression level in Shrink).

I came into this thread looking for info on "why QuEnc vs. HC encoder" since QuEnc is RB's default, and yet jdobbs had said in the recent release notes "This HC encoder just keeps getting better, hat's off (again) to Hank315."

I guess you guys will tell me you've done a lot of experimenting with this stuff, and that that's what I need to do, but--I just want a reliable backup method that works w/o needed a whole lot of program review afterwards!!!

[writersblock29]

@laserfan

[Qouted] "...I just want a reliable backup method that works w/o needed a whole lot of program review afterwards!!!"

DVD Rebuilder's still in beta. That's why we feel the need to ramble and rave about all of our backup attempts, and whine about our failures. Jdobbs can -- has -- use(d) this feedback to improve Rebuilder both in performance and practicality. That's really what all the fuss is about; trying to build a better mousetrap.

The arguement of quality is subjective... which is the hard part. An image that's swimming with pixels might look fine to one person, but drive others crazy. To make matters even more complicated, transcoders might not hit their limits at 60% if they still have plenty of bitrate left to play with (some studios seem to really over-do it just to fill that disk), begging the question "what's the difference?" Where Rebuilder really shines is in full-disk backups. For comparision purposes, I'd invite you to try a jam-packed disk like XXX and put them toe-to-toe, doing a complete full-disk treatment. In the Shrink project, you're going to notice strobbing and edge artifacts galore. If left at default settings, you shouldn't notice any strobing and should see reduced pixelation in the Rebuilder project. Movie-Only standoffs are usually that... standoffs. Both Rebuilder and Shrink are going to yield excellent results in most cases. On the other hand, a long movie like Braveheart, Saving Private Ryan, or Gladiator could be decent testing material; the more material you have, the more you'll appreciate Rebuilder.

Please understand that I'm not saying you have bad eyes! I'm just operating under the theory that you haven't yet handed DVD Shrink more than it can handle. Also, again, quality's subjective. Since many digital programs are transcoded to reduce their bitrate for broadcasting, many of us HDTV owners have simply grown used to seeing pixelation while we're watching television. Then when we see it on our backups... ain't nuthin' but a thang. But to place a full-disk DVD Shrink project head-to-head with a DVD Rebuilder project (comparing with the original if need be), you once again have to appreciate a clear, vibrant, picture!

In absence of CCE (hail to the king!), I'd suggest HC. My own testing with this encoder has shown me that it may be slower than CCE... but the quality's also up to par with CCE. Don't use Rejig: That'd be like trying to out-run a Mustang with a Geo Storm. Not too sure about QuEnc... I've never used it.

*You were right! I DID suggest experimenting!

[Rockas]

I came into this thread looking for info on "why QuEnc vs. HC encoder" since QuEnc is RB's default, and yet jdobbs had said in the recent release notes "This HC encoder just keeps getting better, hat's off (again) to Hank315."
Sorry... that was my choice :)
I'm not saying that jdobbs is wrong... it's just that the freeware version doesn't support (directly) HC Encoder... that's the only reason... when I made the Installer only the freeware was available so... now I may think on changing that... I'll speak to jdobbs about it.

[laserfan]

...Please understand that I'm not saying you have bad eyes! I'm just operating under the theory that you haven't yet handed DVD Shrink more than it can handle...writersblock29 many thanks for your thoughtful reply to my RB-newbie post, I really appreciate it. You are probably right-on w/your assumption re: my use of Shrink; I usually do movie-only backups, and then I strip out extra soundtracks and subs, trim-off logos front and back (not integral to movie), and even super-compress the end titles if they're black & extensive, leaving as much of the disc for the actual good stuff as I possibly can.

Honestly I invested in RB-Pro not so much for its backup capabilities, but for its "convert 4:3 letterboxed to anamorphic" feature and the idea that I am now free to use avisynth filters--I really wanna see if I can upscale some discs to look better on my <very nice> tv.

But back to the backup question, I am intrigued enough by what you guys are doing to try backing-up entire discs for a change. I'm going to try HC next (thanks Rockas for clearing-up for me why it has not been the default).

[writersblock29]

@laserfan

You're very welcome! I'm sure you'll be pleased with the results you get.

[jdobbs]

I'd like to point out also:I burned a copy of Alien last night with Decrypter and Shrink. I copied the whole disc with the exception of the dts track. Next I copied the same movie using DVD-RB and Decrypter. I used the movie and menu only option, but I kept the dts.That is no small matter. The DTS track alone can be as much as 1.4GB of the available 4.7GB for a 2 hour movie. Even at its lowest settings it will use ~700MB. In my humble opinion retaining DTS is never worth the real estate it claims.

[NightSta]

I was using 16x Verbatim media (which I believe to be very good) and a good NEC 16x burner. The problem? I was burning the discs at around 13-15x. Now, I burn at 2.4x or 4x. Perfect burns, every time. I suggest you try this.
Don't forget, some of that may be due to your (or a given person's) DVD Player's tolerances. I use an NEC3500 (16X capable burner), often with Verbatim, Sony, or Fuji (MIJ; the Sony MIJ if possible, though Taiwan media still's OK when associated with that label). I burn @ 12X or 16X and they play fine --- no skipping or stuttering (so long as I don't apply an adhessive label to the top surface --- now that can be a problem, again individual player differences, that).

[Mr. Monte]

I'd like to point out also:That is no small matter. The DTS track alone can be as much as 1.4GB of the available 4.7GB for a 2 hour movie. Even at its lowest settings it will use ~700MB. In my humble opinion retaining DTS is never worth the real estate it claims.

Unless it's a musical DVD (I.E. Eagles - Hell Freezes Over)

Then I see a definate reason to keep the DTS track :)

[jdobbs]

This is a point of contention that has been debated to death so I'll say it but won't respond to arguments... People can't tell the difference between DTS and AC3... and many tests have proven it.

[_SoLaRiS_]

Why not just backup whole disc to dvdr - dual layer and maintain the quality (at a cost) that way.

[NightSta]

Unless it's a musical DVD (I.E. Eagles - Hell Freezes Over)

Then I see a definate reason to keep the DTS track :)

Or a smart trade off: I converted the DTS into AC5.1 and after demuxing, remuxed with AC3 instead. The entire contents of each disc fit on a DVD5 (whereas the retail source was too large for a DVD5, but no where near DVD9 territory).