Final touch size reduction after authoring

[SaSi]

I have been using a technique mentioned here for final touch size reduction of DVDs. Some authored DVDs annoyingly grow slightly beyond the 4.36Gb mark. I have tried using DVD2One and DVDShrink to make a 2~3% size reduction to make them fit on a DVD.

I notice that DVDShrink is useless in this respect. Quantization noise becomes apparent and pictures appear to be composed of single color macroblocks when motion is high.

DVD2One gives much better results.

This - of course - is also a matter of source material. I typically use this for DVDs of captured TV episodes encoded at 3400kbps at full PAL resolution. I know the bitrate is low by itself, however the MPEG video files look fine and the authored disk is 99% TV quality - before shrinked.

Just to let people know that DVD2One may be a better tool for such cases than DVDShrink.

[offline]

Thanks for that comment SaS. It seems quite a few people are
leaning towards DVD2one at the moment.

[Wile_E]

I use Tmpgenc 3.0, and just set it to fill the dvd at 99%. I've never ran into any issue yet, with it creating too big files. It leaves me with about 100-150mb to author menus.

If your concern is quality, I would just re-encode your original avi files again.

[SaSi]

Correct. However, if you want to combine 3 or 4 films (e.g. episodes), plus some motion menus, plus subtitles, you may end up with a few Mb overshoot in total size.

Re-encoding a 45 min episode doing a 4 (1+3) pass with CCE on a P4/2.8 takes about 2.5 hours. And then, the original video must be removed from the authoring script, chapters must be reset, links must be re-established and a lot of other mundane things must be redone.

Taking the authored DVD through DVD2One or DVDShrink, only takes 15 minutes or so.

I believe that shortcuts are good. If they take you to where you want to go and the road is not rough