Encodings

[maxidrom11]

Glad to see the forums are back up. How come discussion boards always go down a couple hours before you realize you have to ask a question?? Anyway, here's my little situation. Up until recently I'd be using DVD Shrink to reduce my DVD9's to DVD5's for burning. A friend told me about DVD-RB and CCE, so I did a bit of reading. Apparently it's unanimous that CCE is the best encoder for backing up DVD media, so I decided to try it out. I used the DVD-RB tutorials, especially the ones at Afterdawn to give it a shot. All seems to have worked, but now I want to actually evaluate the results, and as silly as it sounds I can't seem to think of an easy way to do it. Basically I just want to be able to do a visual comparison of a regular DVD-Shrink backup with my DVD-RB CCE backup (and maybe between a couple CCE backups with different settings/filters). The problem seems to be that non of my normal DVD playing apps support multiple instances, so I can only have one version showing at a time. What's the best way to do some simple visual comparisons?

[Cobra]

Get PowerDVD and use it to take snapshots of certain frames. Use those for comparison. Either that, or use VirtualDubMod to take DVD video and take it back to an uncompressed AVI. The conversion should be lossless, but you can probably open each one up in a separate Windows Media Player or something to do a side-by-side.