So what is new in the transcoding field?

[subferno]

I have been using Nero Recode for my quick backups and DVDrebuilder (not a transcoder but I use it for my backups) for my special backups for years now.

I am just curious if there are any new transcoders worth looking at besides Recode for my quick backups. I don't mind the speed but it has to be better visually. I know I will get complaints for my question because it is subjective but I am just trying to narrow down what is new and widely used nowadays.

Thanks

[guns1inger]

Recode wasn't a compelling reason to stop using shrink, and nothing since has made much impact. RipIt4Me has give a new lease of life to DVD Decrypter and DVD shrink.

The wider availability of Divx/Xvid capable players is now causing some to rethink backing up DVDs to DVD. A reasonable copy can be made using AutoGK or similar and played back on a set top player, allowing 2 - 3 movies with 5.1 audio and good image to be burned to a single disc.

[BJ_M]

"good" , of course, is subjective ................

[parkay2]

Subferno, we think alike. For simplicity, if my video source is good, I'll throw about anything through Sonic and use it as a transcoder to make DVD folder and go on from that. The interseting thing about that is Sonic is a cry baby and wants to transcode EVERYTHING. I've learned to accept it. I want to stay on topic, but I want to share something with you very quickly. I took a DIVX encoded AVI movie (my player WAS/is good but is older and does not play DIVX movies. I ran the AVI through the GUI program called Super. It uses FFmpeg and MEencoder. Anyhow, I took a PAL 528:288 16x9 701 MB DIVX movie 1hr:54 min movie. Threw it into Super, set to: 720x480 4:3 7008 bit rate. I ended up with a 803 mb MPEG2 video file that looked great in PowerDVD and MediaPlayer. I thre the file into SONIC and it loved the video. IT DID NOT TRANSCODE IT!!!. It made the DVD folder. I burnt a 1hr and 54 min movie formatted to NTSC 4:3 720x480 for less than 1gb!!! I decided to try my hat at making a DIVX AVI. I took fiddler on the roof, a three hour movie and used gordian knot to make a DIVX 5.0 AVI movie. The avi looked great! I encoded it in super as I mentioned above and ended up making a flawlessy playing DVD disk that was less than 2.5 gigs!

Suferno for a goof, take a video, encode it using Super and run through your transcoders. You may be surprised. Heck DVDshrink has never come close to the compression level that I achieved threw my goofing around! The quality that I achieved was superior. The compression level that I achieved was about 65 percent squished. DVD shrink output at that level looks horrible!

[guns1inger]

Note - the term good was specifically chosen to reflect that these are not DVD quality, however they should be better than your average 700 MB avi file.

Parkay2's post is a prime example of just how subjective quality is. SUPER is a handy tools for converting odd little formats to other, odd little formats (flv to 3gp, for instance), but I would never have said that quality was it's strong suit, even with a decent bitrate. 2 hours of full-D1 resolution mpeg-2 video in 800MB - I cannot see how it could look anything other than awful.

But each to their own.

[Alex_ander]

One more transcoding engine (a commercial third-party one) is embedded in TDA2. I can't compare it to the older ones because I never use transcoding (have seen how bad the results can be sometimes) and prefer to spend some time on re-encoding.

[parkay2]

Guns1inger, I have a question? but first to defend my self a bit... As part of my job, I have been given kudos for the recordings I have made of microscopic spinal surgical procedures for medical libraries. Automatic 3 chip camera controllers can do a good job "documenting" a procedure, but there is a lot of detail in body fluids that can flood the field during a surgical procedure and the detail is lost during the recording. Manual control over the chroma settings is important to keep great detail of the body structure of lets say a vertebral disk during a discectomy. I do know what good video looks like. As a goof I took the 3 hr movie fiddler omn the roof and used DVDshrink to make it fit on one DVD-5 disk. The result was crappy. The reason for my "investigation" was I turned a 2hr DIVX encoded movie into a DVD and the results were surprising. Yes the the bitrate was somewhere between the SVCD and DVD, but the pixelation on my SDTV was extremely good through my Sony DVD player. I analyzed the DIVX setting of the movie and encoded the DVD of Fiddler on the roof using gordian knot to the same compression levels - bitrate - resolution - audio - codecs - etc... I then performed a bitrate calculation and ran the AVI through super using FFMPEG to fit the 3 hour movie on 1 DVD-5 disk. The DVD shrink version had plenty of blockiness in things like sky that had a lot of solid color, and plenty of blockiness in scene changes, darkeness to light, and some motion noise. The "real" DVD compared to the DVD to DIVX to DVD version was undetectable. I even converted the DVD from widescreen to full version and it looked pretty darned good! I can't aregue the fact that in order to fit it to one disk the bitrate is lower - numbers don't lie. What I am saying is the pixelation and smoothness and color of the movie didn't change much at if any.

Here's my question PowerDVD states that the original movies bitrate is 5.23 Mbps. Playing one of the ripped VOb's, Power DVD states the bitrate is 9.80 Mbps. When I play my created DVD PowerDvd states that the movie bitrate is 3.26Mbps. However when I play one of the Vob's from thae movie PowerDVD states that the bitrate is 104.86 Mbps. Any idea what that is all about?

P.S. I enjoy your frankness... It makes me want to learn more... What I like to do to learn scripting is to use GUI programs, stop the process look at the command lines that were created - learn what the script is doing and edit the command line and run it again from the command prompt.