DVD Shrink 2.3 Quality Question

[pbhalerao]

To fit a big movie on one DVD-R using DVD Shrink, one of the methods is to select the compression - 5%, 10%, 15% and so on.

My question is does the quality drop by the same amount with each compression?

Apologies, if this question was asked before. The DVD-R guides do not explicitly say anything on this issue and Forum search has been disabled.

Regards,

[Faustus]

Not exactly, the quality lost on each setting depends greatly on the movie itself. Some seem to be more hurt then others. Personally I use DVDShrink for 2 things only. Movies that only need level 2 or 3 to fit with just the movie, and Episode DVDs, though the episode part may change soon as I get the cash together for Nero 6 to check out Recode.

Still yet others find that the quality is not that bad even lower on alot of movies. Its hard to judge video quality loss in a percentage, my rule of them is that quality loss tends to be exponential the more you compress, and it almost always holds true. Of course others have different tolerance levels of quality loss also... so the entire issue becomes cloudy.

[gizmofanv]

I have recently shrunk a dvd to level 5 or 30% using DVD Shrink 2.3. I have seen very very slight degradation in quality of movie. This i watched on 27" TV. This is really good software to get the job done.

[Gurm]

Nero Recode is garbage, don't waste your money.

- Gurm

P.S. The quality lost is subjective, AND depends heavily on the source material. Do some searching in here, it's been covered a LOT lately.

[K_cin_az]

DVD Shrink's quality is awsome. especially if you just want to keep the movie only. You usually only have to compress to level 3 or 4 and I cannot tell a difference to the naked eye. And the great thing is it doesnt compress the audio at all so the audio quality is exactly the same.

If you wish to keep the menu's and features then quality wont be that good, but thats to be expected if you are trying to fit 9 gb worth of date on a 4 gb disk

[Gurm]

Again, "awesome" is a relative term. I find the quality to be "acceptable". There's a big difference. But I'm very picky.

- Gurm

[Vejita-sama]

Actually if you haven't already noticed the levels in DVD Shrink and the percentages are NOT constants. They vary with the size of the movie. For a 5GB movie level 1 might be 2%, level 2 5%, level 3 9%, ... But for a 9GB movie level 1 10%, level 2 20%, level 3 30%, ...

The higher the percentage the lower the resultant quaility. And as others have said it's not a linear lost, the higher the percentage the worst things get. How much to to muhc is a matter of personal taste. I have a 32" TV and use to watch/work with a LOT of video. I can see a lot of artifacts that many people don't seem to notice. Remember that most people only record in ep mode so as 'not to waste the tape', so quaility really is in the eye of the beholder.

That's a long way of saying buy a DVD-RW disc, play with the settings and see what is to low FOR YOU.

[SVCDummy]

One other oddity I noticed with DVDShrink. If the early scenes in the movie are predominantly dark (like the Harry Potter 2 DVD) then open up suddenly to much brighter scenes the rest of the movie is adversly affected by whatever calculations were done in the early scenes. If, however the early scenes were bright and active the rest of the movie seems to have much better quality.

Not sure why this seems to be the case but I have seen it on several of my DVD backups. I have started using IC7 for the movies that start out dark and had much better quality.

Anybody else played around with this?

[Gregg]

Hi,

What I've noticed is after you shrink with DVDShrink sometimes the picture is OK even with >6.5GB movies but sometimes even at level 3 the result is heavy pixelation and motion artifacts especialy during the dark and fast portions of the movie.
Example: LOTR1 35% compressed almost unnoticeable degradation.
IM Rock in Rio heavy pixelation and blocky picture very often.

[Gurm]

Gregg,

That's because LOTR had an absurdly high bitrate to begin with. That other movie probably had JUST ENOUGH to get by in the first place.

- Gurm

[Vejita-sama]

Right that's the other thing, do NOT assume that every DVD on the market was encoded at 8000kbit/s. Many were encoded as low as 4500kbit/s (but with much better hardware so they don't look like crap) and dropping them by 10-35% is going to finish them off.

[Faustus]

I think its a little early in the game to call Nero Recode crap, especially without at least telling us why.

All I want recode for is episode disc so I can tottally toss the extra unneeded episodes personally. If it does that its a hero in my book.

[Gurm]

It doesn't do anything useful.

You can't actually adjust, in any meaningful way, anything.

It takes virtually all the control that CloneDVD and DVD Shrink give you away, while giving the ILLUSION of control.

It's ... hard to explain. Download and try it, you'll toss it pretty immediately. DO NOT SPEND MONEY ON IT.

- Gurm

[thxkid]

DVDshrink does a really good job on MOST DVD's and if your doing movie only, but if you want the entire DVD of, lets say Daredevil, its does a pretty bad transcode, DVD2one is much better when it comes to an entire DVD Transcode. hey buy a couple RW's and try a few different settings on both so you can compare both transcodes.

[Gurm]

Absolutely. Over a certain percentage, DVD2one really shines - IC7 is even better at those high-percentage transcodes. But honestly, shrinking a movie that much is just icky and if I _had_ to do it, I'd probably re-encode.

- Gurm