* Putting 12 hours of movies on a DVD from DVD-Shrink *

[dw817]

Hello:

* Well, I looked over the FAQ and did a search and did not find this.
I see where the video is getting compressed, and it looks fine to me, far better than KVCDs I've been using.

What I'd like to know, is how do I get better compression ?
I choose compression and it only goes so far.

I found a way to bypass this, select ALL the movies you want, make it on HD folder (obviously it'll be bigger than 4.7gigs), take THAT set of movies, tell it further compression, make a new folder and keep doing so until that 12-hours fits neatly on 4.7gig.

This is rather clumsy though.
Isn't there a way of choosing deeper compression without using the above-mentioned technique ?


David

http://geocities.com/dw817

(New home of Scenario RPGMaker!)

[jmet]

Welcome to the Digital Digest Video forum dw817!

If you desire more compression (although not recommended), simply run the files through DVD Shrink twice. What I mean is after DVD Shrink finished with the first session of compression. Open the files that DVD Shrink made the first time and run those files through DVD Shrink again.

[blutach]

jmet is basically suggesting you do what you want. However, it is practically an impossibility to get 12 hours on 1 DVD. There's a limit you can compress it, until it all turns to mush.

12 hours will require 4 DVDs. They are not so expensive. Use more media.

AFAIK, DVD Shrink's algorithm is such that when compression gets too poor, it won't go further. You can try to do it 2, 3 4 ,... 40 times, but the difference each time will be marginal and the time taken incredible.

Buy more disks.

Regards

[dw817]

Hi jmet:

Welcome to the Digital Digest Video forum dw817!

If you desire more compression (although not recommended), simply run the files through DVD Shrink twice. What I mean is after DVD Shrink finished with the first session of compression. Open the files that DVD Shrink made the first time and run those files through DVD Shrink again.

* This is what I am already doing (read above)

It does seem to compress considerably less (no less than 80%) the 2nd time around. It might help us DVD builders to allow a completely free compression (no limit) and then show what the video looks like before it is compressed.

The maximum I could get was 6 hours. (6 "Space 1999" Eps)
HOWEVER, the quality was EXCELLENT, no need for re-scanning, sharpening, or otherwise. I was very impressed with the quality and appeared to me to still be DVD.

Now, if maximum compression 2x looks THAT looks good, then isn't there a fine point somewhere between that where it matches or degrades worse than VHS so we can put in better than 6-hours ?

I promise, I won't hold it against the author. If he's limiting the compression for reasons that he's afraid someone might blame him for lousy compression movie quality, no, some of us WANT lousy compression. I would like to see for myself what it looks like when compressed further than the set limit and then decide for myself if I want to use Deep Analysis to improve the picture quality.

I can put a 3-hour movie in KVCD on a single CD that plays in a commercial DVD player (Joan Of Arc from 1999 which is a LONG movie) and the quality is at or better than VHS. It takes 7 hours to calculate in TMPGENC and I used a few filters both in VirtualDUB and TMPGENC itself, but the movie itself was very watchable with very few JPEG jaggies.

* The problem is, to get this high of a quality out of a 700meg CD, there are some "guesstimates" I have to make beforehand, and if I get them wrong, I have to re-encode ALL OVER again another 6-7 hours.

I'm interested in DVDs for two reasons.

One, physically they have more space than a CD and likewise should be able to hold more movies.

Two, using DVD Shrink 3.2 I can decode and burn a movie disc in about one hour with exceptionally high quality if I encode only one movie on it. Currently I am putting on 2-movies per DVD.

Surely DVD can surpass the compression algorithm made with a CD's MPEG-1 to the DVD MPEG-2.

[dw817]

Hi blutach:

jmet is basically suggesting you do what you want. However, it is practically an impossibility to get 12 hours on 1 DVD. There's a limit you can compress it, until it all turns to mush.

12 hours will require 4 DVDs. They are not so expensive. Use more media.

AFAIK, DVD Shrink's algorithm is such that when compression gets too poor, it won't go further. You can try to do it 2, 3 4 ,... 40 times, but the difference each time will be marginal and the time taken incredible.

Buy more disks.

Regards

* I'm not so much going for minimal DVDs as I want to see just what can be cranked out. I'd much rather settle for fully watchable 12-eps of Star Trek for instance rather than 6 that are at a much higher level.

Further, I have made a simple 10-second movie which merely states that the movie will start soon.

I'd like to author my own movies but I also do NOT want to have to convert my .VOBs to .MPGs and am looking for an author program that works directly with raw .VOBs to save considerable time in encoding. Is there one out there ?

To you others who haven't gotten this far, the best I could find was:

HT DVD Authoring Studio 2.0

It has a GREAT easy interface (but is maybe not as powerful as Spruce Technologies' "Spruce Up" DVD authoring program)

The problem with this and other authoring programs is if you are converting a movie, it can take as long as 12-hours to convert a single 2-hour movie to an MPEG-2 where it can then (and apparently only then) be used by the DVD authoring program !

Further, (yep I'm on my soapbox now), KVCDs are 352x240, is there a way to get 352x240 movies from a DVD without converting to 720x480 ? If this is possible, you would effectively quadruple the space available on a DVD with little to no loss of quality, esp. if it is animated or encoded from VHS.

What do you recommend that authors original DVDs with .VOBs that do not require conversion and just EXPECTS the .VOBs to be all in good working order ?

Further, I do not need really advanced DVD authoring.
Just a way to select between two or more movies, even a text menu would be fine, I could render a background picture that shows a clypse of the movie choices around the text selections. Background music would be nice but not required, and I certainly don't need to author DVDs to use CHAPTER selection in the menu, though that also would also be nice, if it were an automatic process and did not require me to select the frames manually.

[blutach]

DVD allows a number of resolutions, if you don't mind watching tiny pictures (where, I suppose quality is not noticed as much, like small 13" TVs)

Allowable picture resolutions are:
MPEG-2, 525/60 (NTSC): 720x480, 704x480, 352x480, 352x240
MPEG-2, 625/50 (PAL): 720x576, 704x576, 352x576, 352x288
MPEG-1, 525/60 (NTSC): 352x240
MPEG-1, 625/50 (PAL): 352x288

As for authoring, VOBs ARE mpgs. A VOB is a multiplexed mpeg2 file - it's a subset of mpeg-2 with some special rules/restrictions.

Demux the VOB into its elementary streams if you want. There are dozens of good demuxers around.

Regards

[dw817]

Hi blutach:

DVD allows a number of resolutions, if you don't mind watching tiny pictures (where, I suppose quality is not noticed as much, like small 13" TVs)

* Tiny pictures ??
Nono .. The resolution is 352x240 and the screen is ZOOMED to full all sides of the screen. DVD critics may complain because of the blocky pixels, but once you actually watch it on a REAL television screen, it looks just fine.

Allowable picture resolutions are:

MPEG-2, 525/60 (NTSC): 720x480, 704x480, 352x480, 352x240

MPEG-2 (NTSC) 352x240 desired.

MPEG-2, 625/50 (PAL): 720x576, 704x576, 352x576, 352x288
MPEG-1, 525/60 (NTSC): 352x240
MPEG-1, 625/50 (PAL): 352x288

As for authoring, VOBs ARE mpgs. A VOB is a multiplexed mpeg2 file - it's a subset of mpeg-2 with some special rules/restrictions.

Demux the VOB into its elementary streams if you want. There are dozens of good demuxers around.

Regards

* Well a VOB or MPEG2 that is several hundred megabytes can take considerable time to demux. I am already using DvdX to convert DVD movies to .AVI (finding that VP62 is the BEST codec).

What I am asking for is a program that allows you to author DVDs by transferring .VOBs directly off of your HD into an image, a directory that Media Player Classic will interpret as a DVD, and/or burn direct to a blank DVD, with the ability of creating a starting menu to select between two or more .VOB sets.

What DEMUX program would you consider ?
Freeware requested but Shareware if nothing else avail.

And, how do I go about making a .VOB that uses the resolution of 352x240 ?

[blutach]

OMG - you're gunna zoom it? Holy moly. What size screen you watching this on? 2"????

I have a rather large screen - 3m wide - and it wouldn't be just "blocky" it would be ridiculous.

Demux with Vobedit or Pgcdemux both easy to use. Get vobedit from IfoEdit in my sig and PgcDemux from VobBlanker in my sig.

Regards

[dw817]

Hi Blutach:

[color=blue]OMG - you're gunna zoom it? Holy moly. What size screen you watching this on? 2"????

* Be serious. 352x240 is not that small. When you watch a VCD or KVCD on a DVD player, the screen is that size, and it zooms to fit the full screen automatically. You really can't even see the top/bottom/left/right 16 pixels on a true television screen so I crop it to 320x208 with black borders.

This is the same resolution of VHS (352x240) so stop exxagerating on how bad it is.

I have a rather large screen - 3m wide - and it wouldn't be just "blocky" it would be ridiculous.

Might be for 3 meters wide. My screen is 19" like most of the people here I think. Television screen is also 19" and nice for company to watch a movie on.

Demux with Vobedit or Pgcdemux both easy to use. Get vobedit from IfoEdit in my sig and PgcDemux from VobBlanker in my sig.

* Bypassed all this.
Found what I needed, it is called, "TMPGENC DVD Author v1.6"
This builds a DVD directory using VOB raw, no conversion and provides major menu building selections. It is QUITE fast since there is no DEMUX conversion needed or desired.

Incidentally, you can right-click on a movie file in DVDShrink 3.2 when you are building a from-scratch movie to bring up cutting out frames from both beginning and end. I couldn't get the 6 eps of Space 1999 to fit on a single DVD maximum compress until I took out the extraneous beginning/end/credits for the 4 eps in the middle. Those mini-minutes make a difference when you have so many episodes repeating similar credit scenes preceding and ending clips.

Okay, so all I am looking for now is a good VOB to VOB converter that does VERY DEEP compression and uses filters to clean-up JPEG jaggies.

Since DVDShrink will only compress so far, is there other competitor software out there albeit Freeware, Shareware, or commercial that ousts it ?

I don't want to discount DVDShrink for the excellent tool that it is.
But until the compression issue is worked on I can use lesser products until then.

[blutach]

* Be serious. 352x240 is not that small. When you watch a VCD or KVCD on a DVD player, the screen is that size, and it zooms to fit the full screen automatically. You really can't even see the top/bottom/left/right 16 pixels on a true television screen so I crop it to 320x208 with black borders.

This is the same resolution of VHS (352x240) so stop exxagerating on how bad it is.

Please yourself, but the rest of the world left VHS behind years ago. It's awful compared to DVD.

You won't find what you want - if you know a bit about mpeg2 encoding (and it sounds like you do), you will know that I frames should be sacrosanct - otherwise, you will get a mess. There's just so much you can do playing around with motion vectors and quant rates in B and P frames.

But good luck in your quest.

Oh yeah TDA is not a bad prog. Not worth the $ IMHO and allows you to turn out uncompliant DVDs, but is good for what it is.

Regards

[DiscoInferno]

Ive been keeping up to date with ratdvd. The author has submitted news on his website that standalone players will be produced that support ratdvd files. Maybe this is the sort of program you want. It can convert a dvd of , say 5 gig , down to 1 gig, or 500 mg, or whatever size you choose. Quality is comparable to a divx file. But then so can nero recode (1.4g) www.ratdvd.dk

[dw817]

Hi DiscoInferno:

Ive been keeping up to date with ratdvd. The author has submitted news on his website that standalone players will be produced that support ratdvd files. Maybe this is the sort of program you want. It can convert a dvd of , say 5 gig , down to 1 gig, or 500 mg, or whatever size you choose. Quality is comparable to a divx file. But then so can nero recode (1.4g) www.ratdvd.dk

* Thanks for the information.
Unfortunately, not only am I using Win98SE (it came back and said the:

CLASS NOT REGISTERED

), it appears to be designed to play movies on the computer.

Pplz, I'm interested in building a DVD that plays in a standard DVD player (or at least one capable of playing 4.7gig/KVCD discs).

If RatDVD is capable of playing it's burns on a normal (or semi-normal DVD player that exist TODAY) and there is a way to get the CLASS REGISTERED for Win98SE so I can continue in it, then please let me know.

If it runs only on the computer. Well -- I have found for smallest size, best picture, and fastest compression (use the live-encoding switch on it for 30fps)

VP62

It was a close runner-up with 3iVX which I was using a year ago and lagging WELL behind are XVID and DIVX for longest encoding time and too many jpeg jaggies for smaller file sizes. If I were to encode movies for computer viewing at 320x240, I would use VP62.

Now, before I incite a riot in here (for you DIVX affectionados) TRY VP62 codec first on small (<1000k/sec) movies before you complain. I think you will be pleasantly surprised at both the time required to encode and quality difference between it and other well-known codecs.

Since RatDVD sees a time when stand-alone players will exist for it, I hope the same is true of VP62.

[nwg]

RatDVD only works on Windows XP or 2000. Quality is below DivX unless the file is over 1GB. There is already a RatDVD DVD player coming out.