I've played with several DVD duplicating programs and none provide the
sort of quality when making a DVD5 from a DVD9 as I have found in many
DVDs that I've found posted on the Internet. Without burning two discs,
which isn't a problem, what software is recommended for best image
quality when converting DVD5 to DVD9.

Thanks for any tips.

Chet

Chet Bosco emailed this:
Chet -- the best is DVD Rebuilder aka DVD-RB, and I've tried at least 6
different programs and run comparison tests, many well informed people on
sites like http://www.videohelp.com/ and http://www.doom9.org/ agree.

Homepages of DVD-RB:
http://dvd-rb.dvd2go.org/index.php
http://www.jdobbs.com/Pages/Downloads.htm

DVD-RB differs from ALL other backup software in that it re-encodes the
video from scratch, obviously at a lower frame rate so it will fit onto a
4.3 GB disk. This means the quality is better but it takes much longer
than, say, DVD Shrink or Intervideo's DVD Copy. To re-encode the video
DVD-RB can use various encoders; 3 or 4 are open source and are installed
with the program, of these HC is considered the best, 2 are commercial CCE
and ProCoder, of which CCE is considered the better. So which is best to
use HC or CCE? The developer of DVD-RB, jdobbs, says they are comparable
in quality but CCE is faster (on a reasonably powerful PC, you can expect
it to take 2-3 hours, I always run mine overnight, using the batch
facility if I have more than one to make). If using CCE make sure the
settings invoke 2 passes (more if you think it's needed, but I've never
found much --if any-- quality improvement by doing 3 passes, except with
Lawrence Of Arabia which is a 4 hour movie).

There is a free version of DVD-RB and a US$30 pro version which I've never
regretted getting. But if you're a student or hard up, you'll find recent
cracked versions of Pro with torrent software, and recent versions of CCE
too (say, Cinema Craft Encoder SP v2.70) which is very expensive.

Some points that may help you. DVD Shrink, which is free, still gives
excellent quality, especially if you use 're-author' mode, which just
backs up the movie stripping out all extra features, if you then also
remove all unwanted audio and subtitle streams, you will maximize the
quality of the video output. This is good advise in general for whatever
software you end up using to get the best video quality you can.

Note that many commercial DVDs can fit onto a DVD4.3 with no compression
needed if you strip the extra features and unwanted audio out, as a result
of this I always use DVD Shrink first to see if this is the case, and only
then use DVD-RB if compression is going to be needed - but I don't usually
care about extra features and I generally only want the English audio
track or original language audio + English subtitles.

By the way, there are tons on tutorials on videohelp and doom9, and forums
on both to help you, where you'd get more responses than here.

Finally note that, there will always be some drop in quality, using DVD-RB
will just give you the best quality you can (currently) get and the
question becomes 'can you notice the quality loss?'. Frankly for the
copies I make with all extra features and all-but-1 audio track stripped
out, I can't tell the difference between the original and compressed
versions. I ran a few blind tests with a few people (and had someone run
them for me) with movies that had needed compression from approx. 5 - 6 GB
down to 4.3 GB (using DVD-RB and CCE SP with 2 passes) and no one managed
better than chance at guessing which was the original, but the movies were
only being displayed on my 32 inch CRT Sony TV, maybe the quality loss
shows up more noticeably on really high quality TVs or when projecting
very big with a decent projector.

Hope this helps, regards, etc..

Oops, please note I should not have said:

"DVD-RB differs from ALL other backup software in that it re-encodes the
video from scratch, obviously at a lower frame rate so it will fit onto a
4.3 GB disk."

I should have said:

"DVD-RB differs from ALL other backup software in that it re-encodes the
video from scratch, obviously at a lower BIT rate so it will fit onto a
4.3 GB disk."

The bit rate is lower to achieve the compression, the frame rate, of
course, is unchanged !!

HTH.

In article <cu7Wh.4616$Ro3.2135 (AT) text (DOT) news.blueyonder.co.uk>,
No.Way.Jose (AT) No (DOT) Spam.Thank.You.com says...

MS, Thanks for the suggestions. I'll head down to the basement
laboratory and give them a shot.

CB