problem with bollywood dvds

[vrdvd]

hello.

i've been ripping and backing up my north american dvds for over a year or so now with very good results using dvd decrypter, dvdshrink on a phillips 228 dvd+r drive.

recently i began trying to backup some hindi/bollywood dvds and hav been getting stumped either producing very poor backups or being unable to back up at all.

these r dvds that were purchased online and are dual layer discs, but their package standards and quality do seem a bit less than normal hollywood releases. most of the discs are from companies such as Eros, Dei purchased from indiaplaza.com. i assume these are legitimate companies but their quality standards.

i read some posts that mentiond the original bit quality of the movie as affecting the quality of the backups. most of the films (for example devdas) was originally about 7gb. wen crunched down in dvdsrhink, movie only, the backup quality always suffers during dance or actions sequences, showing heavy blocking even sticking.

the point i'm trying to make is that i've made backups of large 6+gb) north american movies with great quality but yet the bollywood films continue to exhibit blockiness. is there anything diff i can do or are these films doomed for bad backups? the play and look fine, i'm just wondering if they were encoded badly? has anyone done good backup of these types of films? can u offer up the procedure that u use?

thanks for any advice.

[Forum Troll]

Your best choices are to split the movie over 2 discs, or get a dual-layer burner and use dual-layer recordables.

[Pudah]

but their package standards and quality do seem a bit less than normal hollywood releases.

A bit? Talk about understatements Bollywood DVDs have abysmal quality. Even the worst DVD of the most crappy TV video source is far superior to that of most Bollywood DVDs I've seen. Multiple discs or dual layer discs are probably the best option if you don't want backups that are completely unwatchable.

[smearbrick1]

There is always SVCD for backup purposes.

[winifreid]

I think it depends upon the source. The bollywood disks that I have backed up are fine. I think India has trouble with copyrighted stuff and once a movie hits the street, it's up for grabs. So maybe you have just gotten a poorly produced disk. Try Shrinking movie only and watching it on the computer before you burn it. If it still is blocky (in other words, you eliminate the any possible problems with burns or media), you might try using something like rebuilder instead of shrink.
I saw my first Bollywood film - they were called Hindi Romances, then - when I was in the Peace Corps in West Africa. Everyone from my little village would gather around and sit on the sand and watch the movie on a sheet. Power came from a gas generator. These were very popular along with kung fu films because you didn't really need to understand the dialogue - which no one did since they were in hindi or chinese.

[Cornucopia]

Remember that fast action-such as dancing, kungfu, explosions, etc-give even the best MPEG encoders a hard time--with even the best sources. Sounds like the source isn't top notch, nor is the encoding optimized. To top it off, you're re-encoding in a non-optimized way.

I'd stick with either splitting discs or re-encoding the old way (demux, CCE/TMPGEnc). Remember, you could also sacrifice a little of the audio quality to save some of the bitrate for the video.

Just a thought...You don't happen to be doing any PAL <--> NTSC conversion along the way also, do you? Wouldn't the Bollywood releases be PAL, Region 5?

Scott

[guns1inger]

I'd try using DVD-RB with CCE. Pretty much what Cornucopia has suggested, but it automates the process somewhat. If this doesn't work then there is little else you can do.

[Infiniti2004]

Dunno about that, but I make perfect backups of my Bollywood collection-- and trust me I have a big collection. Are your movies original?? I usually buy mine from ligit places like Indiaweekly and Nehaflix.

[RottenFoxBreath]

most of the blooywood dvds ive seen are lower quality than a tv broadcast,and even the big cinema releases,trailered,are poor too,so a reduction in quality is really going to show.you could always convert to Avi,then use some programmes to convert back to dvd.
i know this works(for single layer media) as a movie a friend backed up looked good this way,it was over 3 hours long(god only knows its name,and i wouldnt ever attempt to remember),but after being converted back to dvd looked just as good as the original.less than 4.2gig,compared to about 8 before.

[winifreid]

What? The first rule of video is "Garbage in, garbage out". You can't make a better video by converting to avi and then back to mpeg2. If it is single layer, you can copy 1:1 with no need to convert anything.

[winifreid]

Excuse me. I meant to write backup, not copy.

[mattyboy]

Bollywood?

[winifreid]

Bollywood=Bombay, India (Center of Indian film industry)

[waheed]

Be careful about where you buy your Bollywood movies from, alot of places sell pirate copies that look just like the original.

If your Bollywood DVD has no copy protection (check with DVD Decrypter), then its a pirate copy. Yes, pirate copies are dual layer and are pressed DVDs too. Most of these do tend to be of inferior quality. Buy only from reputable places.

[pbhalerao]

Eros-DEi sell legitimate stuff. The quality may suck but they are still legitimate. Also Bollywood DVDs are generally region free - because they do not have the numbers to justify region encoding. Also they may not bother with CSS and Macrovision because they may be unwilling to pay extra royalty costs. Hence if the DVD is CSS free/MV free/Region free, does not mean that it is pirated. It is all based on the economy of numbers.

On the quality front, I would put this way:

- movies prior to 2000 have been tranferred by a tele-cine machine and is not a true digital transfer
- recent movies have been released on DVD using a true digital mastering process and as such should not be lousy
- Bollywood does not have a studio system, akin to Warner, MGM, 20CF, etc. Hence the rights are sold by individual producers/distributors. It is only of late that these persons have realized the importance of DVD market and paying special attention to DVD
- The Indian market is not ripe for DVDs. The home segment is dominated by VCDs. It is quite possible that the DVD you may buy/rent is a MPEG1-MPEG2 tranfer.

I prefer to buy Bollywood movies from www.play.com (UK). I have not found these copies lacking in quality.

Regards,

[Ghostmaker]

You might want to try DVD Rebuilder , since it will rencode it and might prevent the blocks your seeing.

[manono]

Hi-

You'd be better off learning some AviSynth, and IVTCing the damn things, thus giving you a 20% quality boost over compressing with Shrink, or even DVD-Rebuilder, which doesn't allow IVTC. Almost all Hollywood movie DVDs are encoded as progressive (the extras are another story), and store 23.976fps on the DVD. Your Bollywood movies are encoded as interlaced, and store 29.97fps on the DVD, thus wasting precious bits. IVTC followed by Pulldown will minimize the quality loss when compressing to DVDR. But, you'll have to do the encoding yourself, rather than letting a crappy program, such as Shrink, or even a very good program, such as DVD-RB, do it. All this assumes that a PAL master wasn't used for the NTSC DVD. If it was, then you'll need some advanced AviSynth knowledge to partially overcome the lousy transfer.

- movies prior to 2000 have been tranferred by a tele-cine machine and is not a true digital transfer

Exactly. But I wouldn't even be too sure about some of the later ones.

[the * dude]

yep, best to re-enc the shit, better off doing at a lowwer res too, since we're talking of vid on average 3hrs ++,

the thing is when you shrink it a trans code, so your triming the extra b/w not needed in the film, unfortunatly, indian films are full of bright colours & loads of extras!!!!!, so you need the full 6++ mb/sec bitrate.

the only way to get a good bacup it to re-enc, better still lower the res to half d1, 352x576 (i think check it up!!)& convert the aspect ratio to 4:3 to anamorphic!!!!.

hollywood movies shrink well mostly because the films aren't over 2hrs + they add extra (not needed) bit rate to the vids, padding so you have too shrink the video in stead of having a perfect copy!!!! hence transcoding is good!!

[the * dude]

oops

"aspect ratio to 4:3 to anamorphic!!!!. "

i mean 4:3 instead of anamorphic!!!

[lumis]

i think changing the aspect ratio is going a bit too far..

i think the best thing for this guy would be to strip out everything except the movie & one soundtrack..

or wait a few months for dvd+r DL to get cheaper.

[the * dude]

manono, or any one else,

why the hell are these film in 29fps anyway & their pal version forced from this, when they originate from a PAL country?????

this does piss me off!!!!!!!

[mgh]

Very simple-max sales of bollywood dvds are in US not in India!!
Check kbps of the original DVD-rip a chapter and check with virtualdubmod-as bollywood movies tend to be long-to fit it on a single DVD kbps is low-most movies i have seen are 4500 kbps(movies under 150 mins)- dual movie DVDs are just about 3000 kbps or less.
Problem is -quite often they reduce contrast to avoid blockiness-try autolevels filter in virtualdub or
ColorYUV(Levels="TV->PC",autogain=true)
with avisynth
I have no problems with them after color correction.