DVD shrink vs DVIX video quality

[sportflyer]

I have been using DVD shrink to back up my DVD 9 and I am quite happy with the results.

Most downloaded Rips use DVIX or XVID about 700 to 800 mb.size. Will the video quality of these be same as the ones I make with DVD shrink after converting to DVD format ? Actually my player can handle DVIX directly without conversion will this be better quality without conversion? Tks

[festmaster]

Any time you transcode, you are going to lose some bit of quality. If your DVD player can play DIVX files, that is your best bet for playing the downloaded files.

[guns1inger]

Movies compressed to 700 - 800 MB are heavily compressed and best played on a PC because many of the flaws and artifacts created by the compression are hidden by the lower gamma of the average PC display. When you play these back on a television many of these flaws become very obvious. Usually they take the form of macro-blocking and banding.

Encoding these videos to DVD format risks the following

1. Every encode using lossy compression throws away information. Depending on how well you do it, this may or may not be noticeable.

2. Encoding to DVD generally requires resizing up to DVD resolution, which enhances the appearance of macro-blocks and banding in the source. Combine this with the usually brighter image quality of a TV, and the flaws become very pronounced

3. Most of these avi files are taken from DVD9 sources. So you are taking a DVD9 source, compressing the hell out of it, resizing it down, then resizing it back up again, and finally, re-encoding to a small size than the original source. This all takes it's toll. Unless the compressed source is H264 (not xvid or divx), it will always look worse than something run through Shrink. Even H264 will look worse after being re-encoded back to DVD.

[sportflyer]

OK Thanks for the info.

Just for the heck of it , I tried one 800mb DVIX and it looked very bad when played back on my panny 59 inch plasma. I also tried a short clip of 720p X264 converted to DVD and that looked pretty good. However the conversion process is very long and messy.