DVD 9 to DVD-R - What is the best process?

[TheGame7]

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I have some DVD 9 discs here that I need to back up.

They are greater than 4.9GB in size.

They do not have any audio channels that I would be able to lose nor do I wish to remove any menus or extras.

What software would you recommend I use?

I headed over to doom9.net and discovered two suggestions, one for quality over speed and the other section for speed over quality.

For example, using Scenarist NT & the big 3 (DoItFast4U, DoCCE4U & ReAuthorist) supposedly maintains quality.

And using something like DVD Shrink is quicker.

Which are most people using these days.

Is there much difference?

Any advice much appreciated.

P.S. I looked in the FAQs and the DVD Shrink tutorial does not take menus and extras into consideration.

[lenti_75]

these day people preffer DVD Shrink....I don't know about the others, but if you keep the compression above 60-70%..then the copy is "perfect", you will not see any difference.....

[4smiley20]

You'll probably want to go with shrink for what you are doing. It has really good features for keeping the menus and extras while still being able to edit out different languages. Anytime you use shrink or any program to reauthor you will lose the menu that you are trying to keep. The best quality backups you can create will normally have the menu and extras stripped out of them. This is so that the main movie is not compressed as much. Keeping the menus and extras is usually a trade off for quality when it comes to dvd 9 movies that are very large.

[jaxxboss]

Actually, if you use dvdclone, u can keep the exact menu.

[TheGame7]

You'll probably want to go with shrink for what you are doing. It has really good features for keeping the menus and extras while still being able to edit out different languages. Anytime you use shrink or any program to reauthor you will lose the menu that you are trying to keep. The best quality backups you can create will normally have the menu and extras stripped out of them. This is so that the main movie is not compressed as much. Keeping the menus and extras is usually a trade off for quality when it comes to dvd 9 movies that are very large.

What do you mean that I will lose the menu? Is that only if I decide to reauthor, which I won't.

Maybe DVDShrink it is...But the sticky suggests Pinnacle's InstantCopy. It may be slower but supposedly retains quality. Is this true?

Any more info much appreciated.

As said before, I must keep extras and menus so reauthoring is not an option.

However, I do not want the most noticable loss in the main video quality either.

Thanks..

[g wiz]

You might want to try something like DVD Rebuilder. It's a total crap shoot as to whether or not you'll ultimately be successful with it, because it's still in the early beta stage, but if you're talking about one movie that you absolutely can't lose quality or menus on, I'd try that. It's not something I'd use on my entire collection because it'd take years compared to DVDShrink. You may want to look into it.

[jimmalenko]

I'd go DVDShrink for its ease of use, speed and quality of output.

[4smiley20]

You can use shrink to do a full disc backup. What I was trying to say was that there is a feature on shrink, as well as most other backup programs, that allow you to reauthor and get rid of the menu and extras while only keeping the movie.

If keeping the menu and extras is a must you are going to have to sacrafice some quality loss. You can't expect to compress 7 or 8 gig of data into a little over 4 gig and have no quality loss. Shrink has decent quality output and intervideo copy2 platinum is also suppose to be fairly good, but even the best programs are not going to be perfect when keeping everything from the original.

[TheGame7]

^^Yes, obviously that is to be expected.

However, I am now in the process of comparing how big a difference in quality there is between transcoding, i.e. DVD Shrink and encoding, i.e. DVDReBuilder.

Any experience with DVDRebuilder? How to the VBR settings effect the final outcome?

[4smiley20]

I've used shrink, dvd x copy, and intervideo copy2 platinum. I don't like dvd x at all cause it creates its own type of copyright protection on the backups it creates. Shrink and intervideo are pretty close in quality with intervideo probably having a small advantage. However the features on intervideo are limited compared to shrink and once your movie is backed up you can only use intervideo to copy the backup.

If there is a significant advantage in quality with rebuilder please post.

[Micke@home]

For full back up I've tried dvd2one, dvdshrink and Nero recode 2.
The advantage with Shrink and recode is that it is possible to lower the quality of menus and extras to keep a quite high quality on the main movie. If I don't succeed to keep at least 90% for the main movie I will go for "movie only" and then use any of the 3 SW above.

My experience with all these SW is that a large size dvd (approx 7-8GB) will have bad quality on certain "dark" scenes. For quality I go for DVD2DVD (DVD2SVCD) which is superb.

For full copy I also tried DVD rebuilder - And that seems to be as good as DVD2DVD but quicker. However it will take a couple of hours...

[TheGame7]

The DVD I tried to back up was a WWE Wrestling event which contains strobe lighting and plenty of action.

When using DVD Shrink, I compressed all the extras/menus as much as possible and turned black screen videos to still motion images.

This still meant a large compression on the main movie though since its a 7 gig DVD.

I then used DVDReBuilder with CCE 2.5 on 2 pass VBR. Obviously, it was not exactly as the original. It had some blockiness in the most strobe lighted entrance, but so did the original - be it at a lesser extent.

DVD Shrink's blockiness at this segment was much more so.

I will be studying the two outcomes in more detail later to see if any of the other scenes are effected in any way.

I will also see if another pass of VBR on CCE improves it significantly.

I think 3 passes will be the max I will attempt as after that, the slight improvement will not be worth the many extra hours.