Recode 2 and Dvd Shrink (a personal opinion)

[japanesebaby]

so unless people wanted to make it look worse and also get rid of the original menu and proper chaptering in the process.... ok, i really don't get what the benefits were supposed to be.

Personally, I find those animated menues annoying. And I'm trying to get rid of them whenever I copy a DVD. The chaptering is not being changed with DVD Shrink at all.

i'm not sure but maybe you're talking about copying some commercial stuff, like movies etc. for your own purposes? i mean, those have annoying aminated menus for sure, i hate those too. i on the other hand have been talking about trade dvds, music dvds that people author themselves. there're rarely any especially annoying animated menus there.

people look freaking thin and squeezed.

That's called "anamorphic widescreen".

yeah, i kinda know that...
anyway, i dont' think i changes anything what we called it, that was not my point. i've gotten unofficial music DVDs especially from torrents where this has been fixed with programs similar to DVDshrink and it ended up destroying the whole thing. so i was just tyirng to make a point that it's amazingly easy to fix aspect ratio with other software that's designed for that. yet people choose to use just about everything - a lot of people go and re-encode, believe me. the same with PAL / NTSC.
and again, not a problem if someone does it for him/herself, but i don't enjoy it receiving these "altered" productions in trades labeled as real things.

"hey you can easily reconstruct this with DVdshrink!"

DVD Shrink cannot reconstruct anything. [/quote]

i was just quoting someone else, an advice i've seen on the torrent sites. don't know what he meant then since i don't have this program and i'm not keen on trying it simply since i have no use for anything like it.  :smth001

Again: It all depends on what you are going to do with your DVD. If you want an exact copy of the original movie which you want to keep as a part of your collection, it should be unshrinked and kept as original as possible. But if you are just making a copy to watch the movie once or perhaps twice, I don't see why one shouldn't shrink the movie so that it fits onto a single layer DVD.

so you are talking about copying (official) movies then? i think there's the difference: most people here have been referring to traded/torrented unofficial dvds as far as i understand. thus the advice "do it in your house but don't infest the world with it" makes sense. if you're talking about copying movies for yourself, to watch at home, then by all means, do what you will.
but for trading/sharing purposes - i see no similar benefits. unless someone fixes a wrongly flagged aspect ratio without re-encoding. there's no point in ripping some very small (non aminated) menus from some trade dvd and then circulate it like that.
yet i've received unofficial music dvds from trade/torrents that have indeed been "processed" this way: and sometimes even the chapters have been ripped away too. hard to see a point in that.

[Oso Blanco]

so you are talking about copying (official) movies then? i think there's the difference: most people here have been referring to traded/torrented unofficial dvds as far as i understand. thus the advice "do it in your house but don't infest the world with it" makes sense. if you're talking about copying movies for yourself, to watch at home, then by all means, do what you will.
but for trading/sharing purposes - i see no similar benefits. unless someone fixes a wrongly flagged aspect ratio without re-encoding. there's no point in ripping some very small (non aminated) menus from some trade dvd and then circulate it like that.
yet i've received unofficial music dvds from trade/torrents that have indeed been "processed" this way: and sometimes even the chapters have been ripped away too. hard to see a point in that.

You are right, I was thinking about copying commercial DVDs when I said that shrinking wouldn't hurt. Fanmade concert DVDs should be kept as lossless as possible, I absolutely agree with you on that.

[bluewater]

I have no idea how lossy the broadcast is, the file is about 8 GB, Video: 1920x1080, 29.97fps, 19400Kbps; Audio: Dolby AC3, 48000Hz, 6ch, 448Kbps. Seems pretty good to me, but I'm no expert in DVDs, let alone HD-DVDs.

Neither am I an expert but it seems just as lossy or even more "lossy" than a normal dvd if you compare the ratio between resolution and bitrate. In general Hd could mean even more compression (per pixel) but higher perceived image quality due to higher resolution...

bluewater

[lostflower4]

Neither am I an expert but it seems just as lossy or even more "lossy" than a normal dvd if you compare the ratio between resolution and bitrate. In general Hd could mean even more compression (per pixel) but higher perceived image quality due to higher resolution...

bluewater

You're right. On a mathematical level, "high definition" can be pretty lossy. I know the bitrate can vary widely depeding on the station broadcasting it and other factors. I'm sure some of it is very fine-tuned to make it still look acceptable at lower bitrates, but some of it is flat out poorly encoded.

I'm not sure if the higher resolution gives a perceived better image quality at a lower bitrate or not. Like I said, I'm not expert on HD stuff.

[Oso Blanco]

Lossy or not, that particular movie has never been released on DVD, and probably never will. It's only available on VHS. And I'll take a lossy digital broadcast over a VHS tape ANYtime.

Someone else has converted it to standard DVD already, so it's really not that important for me to do it again. I was just curious about how to do it, and I would have known how my DVD was being made if I had done it myself. But I guess the guy who did it before me has way more knowledge and resources anyway, so I'd better leave it at that.