10 samples, 10 different settings, here's the result (DVDx)

[Keffie]

I have finally forced myself to do the boring task of encoding 10 minutes of same DVD movie with 10 different settings/combos of DVDx 1.6 and 1.8a. Here's what I've found:

DVD: Bad Boys with Polish subtitles
Computer: Athlon 1600 XP, 256 DDR RAM, Windoze ME, latest Directx
format: VCD PAL
TV format: 16:9
10 minutes of the movie were encoded for each sample, then all the stuff burned to CD with Ulead Movie Maker with menu access for each sample.
Three friends of mine were terrorised and forced to watch the samples on a PAL 16:9 Panasonic 100Hz TV set. They are complete ignorants when it comes to DVD ripping so I could expect a fresh, normal I-just-wanna-watch-the-movie approach from them when voting for the best one. The were just asked to select the one they liked most when it coms to quality, blockiness, color, etc.

I will not plague the forum with detailed settings for each sample, if you are interested please e-mail me at webcard@home.pl and I'll send you a Notepad file with all the details for settings used in DVDx and plugins, etc. Here just some general information and conclusions:

- samples 1-6 were encoded with DVDx 1.6 + Panasonic plugin, same settings used for DVDx 1.6, six different settings for Panasonic plugin.
- sample 7 was DVDx 1.6 alone
- sample 8-9 were done with DVDx 1.8a alone, 2 different settings, the only difference being Output: resize: BiLinear MMx or BiLinear SSE/3DNow
- sample 10 was DVDx 1.8a + TMPEGenc (latest)

The overall winner, and a choice of my friends was definitely a sample made with DVDx 1.6 alone! This also matched my personal preference too, which means I did not go insane, really.
The one coming very close was a DVDx 1.6 + Panasonic (one of the 1-6 samples with some filters and color boost turned on in the plugin).
DVDx 1.8a + TMPEGenc was really good, too, the only problem being that some standalone DVD players tend to shift the picture to the left leaving the whole movie slightly offscreen. This only happens with SOME DVD players (i.e. my AIWA seems to suffer from this, while my portable Panasonic does not) and it ONLY happens with TMPEGencoded MPEGs.
Obviously DVDx 1.8a was light years ahead of DVDx 1.6 in terms of speed but definitely cannot beat DVDx 1.6 in terms of picture quality (overall it's very good, except for some scenes which stubbornly look like the whole thing is floating and shaking a bit - it does not happen with DVDx 1.6)

Conclusion: if you are really into quality VCD and do not care much about the encoding speed then you should definitely go for DVDx 1.6, even if you will suffer from blinking subtitles bug (I am always using subtitles and really, this little bug is not a big pain at all and if you do not need subtitles then you shouldn't care).
If your DVD player does not suffer from TMPEGencoded offscreen picture then you may want to compare DVDx 1.6 with DVDx 1.8a + TMPEGenc combo but my feeling is that they go head to head when it comes to quality.

Please note this test was made for VCD only, I've never tried these settings/combos to produce a SVCD since I'm simply not making SVCDs, being quite content with VCD.

[Rigo]

10 minutes???? I am sure that 10 seconds would do the same thing...
of course was boring.....

[sumibas]

hi,

i used to do dvd ripping using dvdx1.6 before alone. The Quality is really good. but resently i tried using DVDx 1.6 and 1.8a with CCE sp 2.5 and i feel the CCE DVDX combination does better job than dvdx alone. and the speed is almost real time on my P4 1.3 Ghz Vaio with 512 mb Rambus ram.