What is DVD Shrink doing?

[howdy94]

How exactly is DVD shrink doing the compressing? Is it lowering the bitrate, lowering the resolution, or something else. I am thrilled with the results, but just curious about the method.

[wayne421]

From what I understand when you 'shrink' a DVD title it reduces the bitrate flat across the board. Usually retail DVDs ship with titles that are around 6000-7000kbps encoding. DVDShrink reduces the bitrate based on the percentage you choose.

I'm pretty sure that's the deal.

W

[Vejita-sama]

DVD Shrink, InstantCopy, DVD2One and DVD95copy (I'm sure there are a few others I missed) are all transcoders. These transcoders are based on algorithms designed to recompress an MPEG-2 stream in real-time. These programs can transcode an entire DVD movie in only a few minutes, because they do not have to decode and re-encode the entire video stream, but only part of it.

TMPGenc, CCE, MainConcept, Ulead, etc. are MPEG encoders. They take a video source and convert/encode it to MPEG2. This takes time (and a lot of processing power) as each frame is encoded.

Encoding always yeilds superior quaility to transcoding. However, transcoding is much faster and easier. Plus many would state that the quaility lost is less than the human eye can detect (at least for some backups).

Do a forum search on 'transcode, transcoding, transcoders, etc' for more info.