Transcode vs encode - your preference and why

[Shudder]

Just wondering, don't really mean to start a debate.. just more or less curious what people prefer and their reasonings behind it. And maybe people who are on the fence will have a good look at the pros and cons. Please refrain from berating people for their choices since you're not likely to be using their dvd backups anyway. If they can live with their poor (to you) choices, more power to 'em

[adam]

I'm one of those people who values the extras, menus, and even dvd cover art just as much as the movie. For this reason, I refuse to cut out any extras and this means I have to use a lower bitrate for my movie than people who just do movie only. From my experience, transcoders just don't cut it at these compression levels.

I re-encode because the quality looks better, and I have way more control. For instance compressing extras by 70% in a transcoder looks downright unwatchable. Yet if I do this via re-encoding I can resize down to 352x480 or 352x240, IVTC, and add some noise reduction. The result is very watchable and takes up almost no space on the disk at all.

It takes me about twice as long to re-encode and author manually than to transcode. I figure my DVD collection isn't going anywhere, so there's no rush and if you are going to bother backing up your DVDs you might as well use the highest quality means possible.

[Faustus]

As I've said before it depends, if its a movie only that only needs a little compression I will transcode, but the majority of my movies get the CCE treatment because for pure video quality its hard to beat.