Anyone using DIF4U/ReAuthorist/DoCCe4U for full backups?

[KungFuCow]

I've recently started playing around with DoItFast4U, ReAuthorist and DoCCE4U as a way of doing full DVD backups. Basically it reencodes the whole DVD for you using CCE. The tools have become quite advanced. It's not one click backup by any means but it's not rocket science either. Is anyone else using these tools and if so, what is your opinion? I've done about 4 DVDs with them and after getting past the learning curve, it's quite easy with amazing results.

[adam]

I agree, this method produces the best quality backups by far. I just let DIF4U and DoCCE4u run over night and then sometime the next day I spend maybe 10-20mins authoring depending on how complex the dvd is. For most dvds it really doesn't require that much work, except if you have to demux by vobid.

BTW: Not sure if you knew or not but there is a guy currently working on software which will automate the scenarist part for you. Its still in beta but if it ends up working then we will have the ultimate one button dvd backup software. Its supposed to integrate with DIF4U and DoCCE4u so you can just setup DIF4U and let it run. Now that will be nice.

Couple of tips I've found useful with this method:

1) multiangle scenes can be a little trickier to encode. If they are long enough I will go ahead and let doCCe process them, but if they are relatively short, then I will run the DVD through DVDShrink first and just compress these multiangle scenes and leave everything else uncompressed. Then I create a new image in Nero and proceed with DIF4U + DoCCE from there, without processing the multiangle extras.

2) I changed the AVS generator in DIF4U to resize to 352x480 and do heavy noise reduction for its IVTC routines. The extras are almost always pure NTSC, so it will almost always invoke this script. Of course I check all the extra's first to make sure this is the case. By resizing and removing detail the extra's become much more compressible allowing me to use a much lower bitrate. I sometimes even use 500kbits and, while the quality isn't perfect, its definitely watchable and of course the movie really benefits from the extra bitrate.

[KungFuCow]

The software you are refering to is ReAuthorist. That's what I'm using. It works quite well. It handles autosizing of the DVD (Although it has sliders for customization) for CCE encoding and generating the Scenarist script. Basically you let DIF4U rip the DVD, load Scenarist and set up the resizing, click on Author then click on Encode and it launches DOCCE4U and encodes the DVD then does a pulldown if needed.

After that its just a matter of launching Scenarist, building the new files, copy the old DVD structure over and using IFOUpdate to fix everything up. It had a hell of a learning curve for me anyway but once I got on the downside of it, it's pretty painless and the backups, like you said, are great quality.