dvd2onex ratio questions

[reemas]

im sure this has been asled before but searching is bringing up too many irrelevant threads. anyways, how should i know if I should use Constant, Variable or Selective (low, medium, high???) ratios? And what is selective?

thanks.

[alph]

Basically, from what I've observed:

Constant is best for very long movies
Selective is theoretically the best otherwise with medium working well in most cases, but it varies per movie.
Variable should do a good job as well, but can lead to more blocking than selective depending on the level of quality of your original. If you are starting from DVD quality and you are doing less than 50% compression then it's hard to tell the difference between Variable and Selective.

Alph

[reemas]

in the selective mode, what does low, medium and high mean?

[AlbcAlbrr]

in the selective mode, what does low, medium and high mean?

When you use selective, the approach is to seperate in the video what is important or non-important. Say you have a video of someone making a speech while standing in front of a brick wall. Low would compress the brick wall (non-important) while attempting to leave the person (important) alone. Medium would compress the brickwall & the person. High would compress the person while attempting to leave the brickwall alone.

[thoughton]

Your comparison has a slight error: Low would compress wall slightly more than the person, medium would compress the wall a lot more than the person, high would compress the wall a lot and hardly compress the person at all.

[Spoffo]

I have always used "constant" but the name isn't totally accurate. Apparently, DVD2oneX will try to maximize video quality by by heavily compressing menus and such to save room for the real titles - even when set for "constant."

I recently backed up some "West Wing" discs where I wanted to use the menus for chapter selection, even though this meant compressing 6.6 or 6.8 gb into 4.4. The program compressed the fancy video menus to point of VERY heavy macroblocking, but preserved excellent video quality on the actual episodes (almost 3 hours worth per disk.)