Burning high quality DVD Video

[Nate7410]

Lately I've been trying to burn movies that I have on my computer onto DVDs, and I haven't been happy with the video quality. I've tried several different programs. I tried using TMPGEnc 4.0 XPress to encode the movie with 2-pass VBR, and some othe settings that people recommended on this site and others, and authored it with TMPGEnc DVD Author 3, but the quality was still disappointing. Also, the DVDs I authored with TMPGEnc don't even play smoothly.. they freeze for a second, every so often. The ones I made with other programs don't have that problem.

Is there anything that I can do to achieve higher video quality, or is this pretty much as good as I can do? And why are the discs I made with TMPGEnc not even playing smoothly?

[guns1inger]

Discs not playing smoothly can be caused by a number of issues. It depends on exactly what you mean by "not smoothly" as to what they might be.

1. Video plays continuously, but pans and zooms are jerky. Poor format conversion, usually from NTSC 23.976 to PAL 25 or NTSC 29.97 without pulldown. Some programs do format conversion well - ConvertXtoDVD, FAVC - others do it poorly - Nero, WinAVI. I don't know how well tmpgenc 4 Express does it.

2. DVD image skips or breaks up. Generally this is caused by either cheap media, sick and/or dying burner, or software issues. Process of elimination is all you have here. Test the results on your HDD before burning. If they are smooth then you know the encoding is OK. Buy good media if you haven't been TY or Verbatim are good. Use Imgburn to burn your discs. If you still have issues, test on a different player.

As to your quality issues . . . .

You don't specify the source. I will make an assumption that these are 700MB avi files, probably encoded with Divx/Xvid. Horizontal resolution is probably 600 pixels or less. They play fine and look OK on your PC.

Except that they are rubbish. Sorry to break it to you, but they have been resized down from DVD resolution, possibly badly cropped, deinterlaced, and very heavily compressed. Yes, the play OK on your PC, but the playback software and the darker gamma curves of your monitor hide a lot of the problems. When you resize the image back up to DVD resolution and re-encode, and watch it on a TV, all the damage done by the original encoding to Divx/Xvid is exposed. If you want to spend some time learning about avisynth or virtualdub filters and frameserving then you can look at some of the deblocking filters. MSU's smart deblocker is quite good, but very slow. But ultimately, the old adage "Garbage in- garbage out" hold true to this day. Your results will, most of the time, only be as good as your source. And like it or not, most downloaded source is not good.

[Nate7410]

You're totally right about my source files. I totally get what you're saying about the quality issues. So I suppose I'm at, or near, the best quality I can get out of these files. I'm going to change the subject, then... can I take a commercial DVD movie like one that I purchased, rip it, and burn it to another DVD without ever converting and losing quality? How would I go about doing that?

Thanks. I'm learning a lot.

[guns1inger]

DVD Decrypter (with AnyDVD in the background for newer titles) : Mode -> ISO Read.

Load up Imgburn, Mode : Write and select your ISO. Burn to a DL disc and you have a 1:1 copy sans copy protection and unwanted user prohibited operations.

[Nate7410]

Awesome. Thanks.

Another question. How much quality would I lose if I copy a movie from a DL disc to a regular DVD-5, using DVD Shrink or something? Will they still turn out pretty good?

[redwudz]

You will likely have to judge that for yourself. It depends mostly on how much you need to 'shrink'. I mostly do only the main movie, no extras or extra sound tracks or subs. Then the 'shrinkage' is minimal and the quality looks good to me. For better quality, you could use a program like DVD Rebuilder and re-encode instead of transcode like Shrink does. But it will take a lot longer.

[guns1inger]

It depends what you copy, how much of the original DL was used, and how much you reduce it by. If you re-author and take just the movie (no extras/menus/second languages etc) then you may find that it fits on a DVD-5 with little or no reduction needed. If you want to keep everything then you will find that the quality will be affected.

How much you can reduce a disc by before DVD Shrink shows quality loss varies form disc to disc, so there are no simple rules. That said, If you are trying to squeeze 7 - 8 GB on a DVD-5 then Shrink isn't the best tool for the job, IMO.

My basic rules are

0% reduction - Imgburn

0 - 10% reduction - DVD Shrink

10% or more - DVD Rebuilder. I would also use the half-D1 for Extras option in DVDRB and squeeze the extras to give the main movie all I can

99 times out of 100 I will just do movie only, and if I really want the extras, I will split the disc so I have movie only on one disc, and extras on the other.