What transcoding ratio do you feel is the low limit?

[Tidy]

I am just curious what transcoding percentage everyone thinks retains acceptable quality?

[Nilfennasion]

It depends on a lot of different circumstances.

I would never compress a disc like The Godfather more than 90% at the most (ie I mostly split it over two discs) because the quality of the original disc is pretty poor to begin with.

[gitreel]

whatever level that your eyes tell you it looks bad. Not trying to be rude. This is a subjective question. Everyone is going to tell you something different

[redwudz]

With me it's 70%, and that's with good quality source material.

[lordsmurf]

59.8756123%

But seriously, a % of what number?
The original numbers are the most important.

[reboot]

Between 8 and 12%. I'm cheap, and I like to cram 8 full length movies onto one dvdr

[Tidy]

This is just an off the wall question nothing that serious. I am not trying to answer any questions or anything I was just curious to see what people's answer would be. And I completely agree that it is largely based on the quality and size fo the original.

[BSpielbauer]

I never use anything less than 100%.

Never.

Your question is truly meaningless unless people are to post such specifics as the size of the display they view it on, the size of the original film (as someone pointed out), their own level or tolerance for viewing a degraded picture, their own sense of pickiness, their own willingness to switch DVDs during playback, their own desire for "extras," and more.

But, again, to answer the question, I always use zero compression when I backup a DVD.

-Bruce in Chi-Town

[fritzi93]

Depends on the source, but 85-90% DVDShrink, 75-85% Instant Copy, and re-encode to 1/2 D1 in TMPGEnc when lower than 75%. Just my own rule-of-thumb.

[Tidy]

spielbauer: really, the queestion is not meaningless, asking the percentage answers all the questions you mentioned. I never thought I would get such flak for asking a question that was really unimportant. I guess I am strange I was just curious as to what the concensus would be. I used to be a nothing below 100% byut lately I have been taking down to about 55% and have noticed no degradation. Or at least no discernable degradation. Remember most DVD's are pressed at almost twice the resolution of a regular television.

[burnman99]

0.03% This allows me to back up the entire LOTR to my Floppy!

Have fun stormin' the castle!

Rog

[Boffo]

Actually, I can jam like 10 or more sci fi movies on one DVD at .001%. I have a great imagination and only need the sound to go there!!!

[flaninacupboard]

Remember most DVD's are pressed at almost twice the resolution of a regular television.

That's just not true!

[narked]

Actually, I can jam like 10 or more sci fi movies on one DVD at .001%. I have a great imagination and only need the sound to go there!!!

Just keep taking that medication I say

No seriously though, depends what I'm watching. Return of the king say, I'm reluctant to go under 8Gb insize. Dexter's lab though (poor animation) I will convert to 1150kbs at 352*288 giving 5 and 1/2 hours per disc... No discernable loss in quality.. The filming was shite to begin with...

[Nilfennasion]

Remember most DVD's are pressed at almost twice the resolution of a regular television.

NTSC television signal: 500 vertical pixels.
PAL television signal: 600 vertical pixels. Give or take in both cases.

NTSC DVD: 720x480
PAL DVD: 720x576

Sounds to me like someone has been on a flight of speculative fancy.

[indolikaa]

Dexter's lab though (poor animation) I will convert to 1150kbs at 352*288 giving 5 and 1/2 hours per disc... No discernable loss in quality.. The filming was shite to begin with...

The filming may be shite, but the content is caviar.


Whatever it takes to Shrink is what I do. I don't have a preset limit; if the quality doesn't match my expectations the project gets split.

[thor300]

Quality loss is usually visible under 80% with shrink, so i kinda decided a while ago to not go below 80, but posts i read lately made me reconsider it, i think it depends much on the movie too, some movies can probably be compressed much lower without significant quality loss, so i will give shrink a try and have a look at the result before reencoding next time i need below 80. Doesnt take that long, so why not try and see?
Btw, i thought re-encode or re-code or whatever this Nero-stuff is called use the same engine as shrink, same developer, how can it be better?

[Nilfennasion]

Now that dual-layer burners are about to be released, the question will soon become moot. Once I have one, the policy will be that if I have to compress a disc more than 10% after I've removed the unnecessary dubs and/or unnecessary subtitles, I'll just burn to DL and be done with it.

[flaninacupboard]

It's going to be a little sad once DL burners are the norm, what was once a diverse and complex topic will become so simple.
"how do i backup a DVD?"
"install DVDdecrypter, put your movie in your DVD-rom and your blank disc in your DVD burner. hit backup.

it'll just be DTV, capturing, OT and broken Divx from then on!

[Nilfennasion]

It'll never be quite that simple. Some folks, like myself for instance, will still want to know how to strip out the copyright messages. That is really the only reason I make the backups in the first place - so I can play my favourite films and not have to read copyright messages in more languages than I understand. I will always be visiting a site that tells me how to do that and keep menu functions or whatever.

[flaninacupboard]

i think as well as removing macro and region coding it strips user prohibitions as well, doesn't it? or is that DVDshrink? either way, just hit "skip" and they're gone.

[Tidy]

Well apparently I was mistaken about being double the resolution. i was always under the impression that NTSC televisions were 320x240 (sounded low to me when I was told that) I geuss that's what I get for believing what i read LOL.

[Shudder]

and re-encode to 1/2 D1 in TMPGEnc when lower than 75%

Wow, that seems fairly wasteful to me, even movies at 65% done in Rebuilder (with CCE) look better than 1/2 D1 ever would.

[thor300]

Wow, that seems fairly wasteful to me, even movies at 65% done in Rebuilder (with CCE) look better than 1/2 D1 ever would.

Thats much because CCE is not a domain transcoder. In my opinion most encodings with CCE look good, its very good at low bitrates, but there is a limit where also CCE will give better result with half D1 compared to full. Try 5 hours in 1 DVDR, im sure also you would prefer half D1. But then 5 hours will never look good anyway I have no special limit where i will use D1, i just try a piece in full first then try 1/2 if full gives visible macroblocks, it depends much on the type of video, but i prefer a bit blurred instead of lotsa macroblocks.
I guess some people would not see the diference anyway, it depends very much on the DVD player, so untill the cheap players start thinking picture quality instead of "play everything thrown at it" many people will not need to worry about it. A DVD player should first of all play DVDs, many people forget that part, unfortunatley. Like a Mustek DVD player that was so cheap (and therefor also popular) in Europe 1-2 years ago, played everything except original DVDs

[Shudder]

Well, I assume we're talking about standard 90-120 minute movies, so IMO 1/2 D1 is overkill. For TV shows that are already poorly encoded, maybe not.

[thor300]

I agree with you Shudder, but not many average movies at 90-120 minutes will need 65% compression after removing extra audiotracks and bonus material. Some "90 minutes" movies have overkill bitrate, so in some cases even 60% will look great with Shrink. I dont feel CCE is necessary for 90-120 min movies anyway, DvdShrink can do it just as good in less time.

[fritzi93]

try a piece in full first then try 1/2 if full gives visible macroblocks, it depends much on the type of video, but i prefer a bit blurred instead of lotsa macroblocks.

I fully agree. Haven't done all that many at 1/2 D1, it makes more of a difference in AVI conversions. IMHO. But I hate those rotten, stinkin' macroblocks. Again, it depends on the source, but I've had macroblocks at 70%, can't think of examples off the top of my head. On my 25 inch TVs, though, 1/2 D1 generally looks just fine. We all come to our own conclusions, many things are not hard-and-fast in this hobby.

[Nilfennasion]

i think as well as removing macro and region coding it strips user prohibitions as well, doesn't it?

DVDShrink has options to remove those things. I don't know about DVDDecrypter. But my key point there was removing the actual copyright messages. You know, those big static screens that remind you in several languages (or several dozen in the case of PAL discs), many of which the user doesn't understand, that you're not supposed to copy the damned thing? A friend of mine in the UK once complained about how it takes several minutes just to get to the menu because of these messages. So, in a nutshell, cut out the copyright messages, trailers, etc, and the problem is solved. People are going to need to know how to do things like that.

[Shudder]

With AVI conversions and TV show DVDs from those avis, half d1 all the way

Thor: Time isn't much a concern for me - it could take 60 minutes with Shrink or 8 hours with DVD-Rebuilder and I know RB's going to look a hell of a lot better, so I'm going to use it if the compression dips below 80%. Sure, maybe it does have overkill for the bitrate, but that just ensures that I'll have no artifacts when I reencode it.