DVDShrink encoding engine -care to comment?

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My experience with DvdShrink is still small, but so far excellent. In
spite of the need to reencode and lower the bitrate by half, the
results do still look very good. I believe it uses some open source
(or just freeware) mpeg encoder. Can anybody comment on it? Would you
say the encoder is really that excellent? Should we perhaps give it a
try, instead of using Tmpgenc, CCE, MainConcept... ?
 
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Bariloche wrote:
> My experience with DvdShrink is still small, but so far excellent. In
> spite of the need to reencode and lower the bitrate by half, the
> results do still look very good. I believe it uses some open source
> (or just freeware) mpeg encoder. Can anybody comment on it? Would you
> say the encoder is really that excellent? Should we perhaps give it a
> try, instead of using Tmpgenc, CCE, MainConcept... ?


DvdShrink does not reencode your video. If that were the case, it would
take at least overnight to do the processing.

It strips the "unnecessary" bits from the video stream, thus lowering
the bitrate.


-WD
 
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On Tue, 06 Apr 2004 15:02:52 GMT, Will Dormann
<wdormann@yahoo.com.invalid> wrote:

>DvdShrink does not reencode your video. If that were the case, it would
>take at least overnight to do the processing.
>
>It strips the "unnecessary" bits from the video stream, thus lowering
>the bitrate.

It can do a full copy, or remove parts. There's also DVD2One, which
does the same. The output fits exactly in a DVD-R -another reason to
believe it is re-encoding the video (not the audio).
 
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Bariloche wrote:

> On Tue, 06 Apr 2004 15:02:52 GMT, Will Dormann
> <wdormann@yahoo.com.invalid> wrote:
>
>
>>DvdShrink does not reencode your video. If that were the case, it would
>>take at least overnight to do the processing.
>>
>>It strips the "unnecessary" bits from the video stream, thus lowering
>>the bitrate.
>
>
> It can do a full copy, or remove parts. There's also DVD2One, which
> does the same. The output fits exactly in a DVD-R -another reason to
> believe it is re-encoding the video (not the audio).


Believe what you want, but you're wrong. I stand by my original
statement.


-WD
 
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Will Dormann wrote:

> Bariloche wrote:
>
> > On Tue, 06 Apr 2004 15:02:52 GMT, Will Dormann
> > <wdormann@yahoo.com.invalid> wrote:
> >
> >
> >>DvdShrink does not reencode your video. If that were the case, it would
> >>take at least overnight to do the processing.
> >>
> >>It strips the "unnecessary" bits from the video stream, thus lowering
> >>the bitrate.
> >
> >
> > It can do a full copy, or remove parts. There's also DVD2One, which
> > does the same. The output fits exactly in a DVD-R -another reason to
> > believe it is re-encoding the video (not the audio).
>
> Believe what you want, but you're wrong. I stand by my original
> statement.
>
> -WD

Hopefully this isn't a dumb question, but how does it remove "extra bits"
without re-encoding? Isn't that by definition, "re-encoding"?

Hey, it's an honest question...
 
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> > >>DvdShrink does not reencode your video. If that were the case, it would
> > >>take at least overnight to do the processing.
> > >>
> > >>It strips the "unnecessary" bits from the video stream, thus lowering
> > >>the bitrate.
> > >
> > >
> > > It can do a full copy, or remove parts. There's also DVD2One, which
> > > does the same. The output fits exactly in a DVD-R -another reason to
> > > believe it is re-encoding the video (not the audio).
> >
> > Believe what you want, but you're wrong. I stand by my original
> > statement.
> >
> > -WD
>
> Hopefully this isn't a dumb question, but how does it remove "extra bits"
> without re-encoding? Isn't that by definition, "re-encoding"?
>
> Hey, it's an honest question...
>
>
>

By that I assume he meant it has the option to strip away extra bits as
in features and menus. But even if you leave all that in it makes a
good copy. It obviously is reencoding since it allows you to set the
compression ratio. You could fit a DVD on a CDR with it if you wanted,
it would just look like Lego land.
--
_________________________
Chris Phillipo - Cape Breton, Nova Scotia
http://www.ramsays-online.com
 
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Keith Clark wrote:
>
> Hopefully this isn't a dumb question, but how does it remove "extra bits"
> without re-encoding? Isn't that by definition, "re-encoding"?
>
> Hey, it's an honest question...


Sure, that's a valid question, Keith.

The distinction between true encoding and what DVDShrink does might not
be that clear to all. If you've ever encoded MPEG2 video, you'll know
that it takes a long time. So how is it that DVDShrink can take an
entire movie and shrink it in about 15 minutes? It doesn't re-encode
your video. It rather takes the video stream and strips out the least
significant bits from it.

This page can probably explain it much better than I can:
http://nerds.palmdrive.net/dvds_tmpgenc1.html


-WD
 
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Will Dormann wrote:

> Keith Clark wrote:
> >
> > Hopefully this isn't a dumb question, but how does it remove "extra bits"
> > without re-encoding? Isn't that by definition, "re-encoding"?
> >
> > Hey, it's an honest question...
>
> Sure, that's a valid question, Keith.
>
> The distinction between true encoding and what DVDShrink does might not
> be that clear to all. If you've ever encoded MPEG2 video, you'll know
> that it takes a long time. So how is it that DVDShrink can take an
> entire movie and shrink it in about 15 minutes? It doesn't re-encode
> your video. It rather takes the video stream and strips out the least
> significant bits from it.
>
> This page can probably explain it much better than I can:
> http://nerds.palmdrive.net/dvds_tmpgenc1.html
>
> -WD

Cool, thanks!
 
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On Wed, 07 Apr 2004 14:38:28 GMT, Will Dormann
<wdormann@yahoo.com.invalid> wrote:

>Believe what you want, but you're wrong. I stand by my original
>statement.

Not trying to believe, but to understand. The link you provide was
very demonstrative.

Now, do you know ReMpeg2?. This program states it is a transcoder,but
at the same time speaks of encoding, so it is not clear the approach
it follows. It looks strange to me that one would be able to reduce
resolution without re-encoding, but then I do know nothing about mpeg
compression internals.

Whenever I have tried to use ReMpeg2, it worked all along until the
last frame, where the program would hang the computer. Thus, I cannot
compare, but I speculate that it is a much better approach to lower
both the resolution and bitrate by half, as thus the bits/pixel are
preserved, which should avoid the generation of artifacts as much as
is possible under the circumstances. What do you think about this?
 
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Bariloche wrote:

> Whenever I have tried to use ReMpeg2, it worked all along until the
> last frame, where the program would hang the computer. Thus, I cannot
> compare, but I speculate that it is a much better approach to lower
> both the resolution and bitrate by half, as thus the bits/pixel are
> preserved, which should avoid the generation of artifacts as much as
> is possible under the circumstances. What do you think about this?

No, I am not familiar with ReMPEG2. But a cursory check of the
software leads me to believe that it is indeed re-encoding the video.
The progress bar at the bottom indicates that it is decoding and
encoding each individual frame. I'm currently processing an 8-minute
M2V file and it is estimating over 17 minutes total processing time.
(Compare this to DVDShrink's approximate 17 minutes to process an entire
90-120 minute movie on my system)

I have found that if you need to agressively compress the video, going
to a Half D1 resolution can give you better results than Full D1 at the
same bitrate. But in most cases, where DVDShrink is compressing maybe
from 0-25% or so, its "bit stripping" method should suffice.


-WD

P.S. ReMPEG2 did run to completion without error on my machine, FWIW.
 
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On Thu, 08 Apr 2004 20:43:03 GMT, Will Dormann
<wdormann@yahoo.com.invalid> wrote:

>I have found that if you need to agressively compress the video, going
>to a Half D1 resolution can give you better results than Full D1 at the
>same bitrate.

So ReMpeg2 should be able to deliver a better (albeit much slower)
result than DvdShrink. Unfortunately, I'm not able to test it, as
ReMpeg2 stops at the last frame in my system.

>P.S. ReMPEG2 did run to completion without error on my machine, FWIW.

Lucky you!