problem with tv box sets?

[downer]

i am new to converting dvd-9 to one dvd-r. i was wondering why in the common questions post that there was a question about t.v. episodes box sets? why are they different?

can anyone recommend what method they think would be best to back these up on one dvd-r and regain the best quality possible?

thanks in advance.

[Psycho_Dad_Rules]

Hi,

The Eposide DVD's are different because first of all they mostly contain more playing time than a regular movie (Stargate SG-1 DVD's contain 3 hours per DVD.) and most conversion programs (DVD95Copy, DVD2One etc) concentrate on "the main" movie, for best quality. Since Episode DVD contain more than one "main movie" you could end up with only one good episode and the rest just crap.

I can really recommend Instand Copy for Episodes. It give you complete freedom as to what audio tracks to keep, and which video (movie, episodes, menus, extras etc) should have what quality, so you can even out the quality over all epsiodes and leave off extra's.

Hope this helps.

Greetz,

pSyChO dAd

[broaddd]

I'm having trouble getting good results shrinking Stargate with DVD2One - lots of background (and even foreground) pixelation on flat colours etc.. Is the above post correct that DVD2One compresses one title less than others? If so, or in any case, would using constant bitrate work better?

Cheers,
B

[cybertlc]

That's your problem. USE PINNACLE INSTANT COPY FOR EPISODIC DISCS! You won't have an issue, no pixelation, NOTHING. I've done it manyyyyy times. All of the other programs are crap at episodic discs.

[LeeBear]

When your DVD needs to be heavily compressed (like with most episode disc) you really need to re-encode instead of transcoding it. I suggest trying DVDRebuilder with CCE as the encoder, or goto www.doom9.org and read up on backin up DVD's using the big three method. I've had very good results with DVDRebuilder on the Family Guy episode discs which had to be compressed down to 56% of it's original size.

-LeeBear

[lordsmurf]

I had no trouble with seasons 1-5 SG1 using DVD Shrink with deep analysis. The season 6 release was just too full, would not transcode. Lots of mastering and authoring errors too. No way to really back that one up.

[handyguy]

If you can play it on a source dvd player you can record it on a dvd recorder at LP mode, that is 4 hours & it should look pretty nice. Panasonic e55 is one dvd recorder.

[wulf109]

DVD95COPY,keep only one audio stream. Keep the 192/2.0 audio stream if available.

[iantri]

To explain the cybertlc and Psycho_Dad_Rules' comments, Instant Copy that does something inbetween DCT domain transcoding (the method that most DVD copy software uses) and re-encoding. I do not remember the details, but it provides higher quality.

If you are willing to spend some money DVD Rebuilder re-encodes with CCE. It is actually faster than Instant Copy and produces better results.

That, of course, requires an expensive copy of Cinema Craft Encoder.

[Darth Paris]

So what is the best method overall for episodic discs?

I'm having trouble getting good results shrinking Stargate with lots of background (and even foreground) pixelation on flat colours etc..

Thats ok. I backed up my Voyager DVDs so I could watch them on my trip to Canada. On the trip while I was watching them I noticed alot of pixelation on dark colors. I figured it was the compression. I get home and try to watch them and the real ones looked like shit. Anyone else have any Voyager on DVD?

[KenNashua]

I've been trying to split SG-1 season 6 to two DVD-R's to no avail. Is there any way to split these and still keep the menus?

[wulf109]

CloneDVD will allow you to split the episodes and keep the menus. I use for this on Star Trek disks.

[Madz]

I've used DVDFab for the episode DVD9->2DVD5. Worked well for most of my collection but actually refused to split a couple, simply stating that I couldn't & greying out its option to do so; no reason why. Queer As Folk: Season One, Disks 3 & 4 come to mind (even though it did 1 & 2 w/ no trouble!).

[steptoe]

The way I use to backup multi-episode discs is :

Rip entire DVD using DVDDecrypter

Import each individual episode into TMPGenc DVD Author as a separate track

Create your menu

Create output ignoring the message about non-standard DVD as obviously its likely to be bigger than a DVD-5 now

Run through your transcoder to fit on one DVD, just run through as a full disk, (I use DVD2One 1.5, with new options set to medium), its faster than most and unless someone can suggest otherwise I find it better, especially the latest version with the new options
With this method, you can squeeze more episodes per DVD, or reduce the number of epiosdes per DVD, or put them in the right order as I found with some episode DVDs that don't have a set order of date (Hammer House of Horror, no set order, but I put them in order of date of showing)

Maximum I've found is about 6 hours, any more than this and the transcoders really struggle to squeeze it down enough

You could squeeze it down even more by extracting and converting the soundtracks from AC3 to an MPEG2, and import the soundtrack into TMPGenc DVD Author as a replacement soundtrack

I tried DVD2One and InterVideo DVD Copy Platinum 2 and both failed to transcode when about 6 1/2 hours of episodes, just to see how far I could go really

[MackemX]

this is addressing the older posts regarding Instantcopy in this thread. @Psycho_Dad_Rules, don't take this the wrong way but you must have a forgiving player as Instantcopy is not the tool to use to remove DVD content due to the way it 'butchers' the structure so I would never use Instantcopy to remove anything. If anything I would use DVDShrink first and then transcode with IC afterwards but most think DVDShrink's quality is now comparable to IC. DVDShrink also allows selective menu removal with variable compression . IC is just like CloneDVD as it's all or nothing regarding menu's which sucks

@Darth Paris or anyone else, for the price of a blank these days most users normally just split episodics rather than sacrifice on quality and the time/effort involved is minimal also. DVDShrink is probably one of the easiest and definitely the cheapest. If you ever did need to compress then DVDShrink has the better option of being able to remove selective menu's for the any episodes you have removed. As mentioned earlier in this post, I could also recommend CloneDVD but chances are that the user will eventually need to remove something in the menu's on another backup which CloneDVD doesn't do!. It also doesn't allow the user to specify which parts of the DVD get what compression which affects the quality big time

@KenNashua, it's a shame DVDRemake hasn't got a fully working demo as I'm pretty sure it could split that SG season 6 disc like I did with the 24 one and I saw that lordsmurf tried DVDShrink with it but DRM tries to fix stuff like that also. PGCEdit might be another option also though it's a little more complicated if you haven't got an understanding of the DVD structure

@Madz, DVDFab normally barfs if one of the split DVD's is going to be greater than 4.37Gb due to linked Titles or if it's too complicated to split but I'm sure they did update it so a few problematic DVD's could then be split

[KenNashua]

wulf109's suggestion of CloneDVD was a good (though not free) one. CloneDVD managed to correctly parse out the different titles which I could then eliminate. What you end up with is a DVD which acts identically to the original with all the menus until you try to play one of the cut episodes at which point it just returns to the menu. This is pretty close to ideal as one could expect without having to go in an modify the menus (is there an easy way to do this?)

DVD Shrink wouldn't work except for reauthoring mode as all the episodes are in one VTS and not only that, but in the wrong order (EP4, EP1, EP2, EP3).

[BobK]

I tried Instant Copy (both 7 and 8) for a while last year. They worked great- until I had to go back to a disk I'd done previously to make some changes. I discovered that nothing else I tried would open a disk made with IC except IC. That included DVD Shrink, TMPG DVD Author and a couple other things I tried.