constant quality for compressed dvd's

[majorpain87]

I have some copies of some dvd's made with dvd shrink. They are legal copies because the material is not copyrighted. One of the dvd's is a documentary called zeitgeist and I have two more educational dvd's. I want to make an mkv of equal quality. Since the video has already been compressed by dvd shrink, should the constant quality be set higher than normal? What is the best way to rip these dvd's while retaining quality?

[mtherault]

It should be set lower. You will never recover the quality that DVDshrink took away from compressing them even by setting it higher.

For constant quality I never go past 65% from an MPEG2 source (DVDs are MPEG2). You will always lose a certain amount of quality just due to the nature of transcoding from one source to the next. There are a couple of things you can do to "clean up" the encode. You will never get back the original though.

However, if you want to retain as much of the quality without any sacrifices just copy the DVD to hard drive. However, since you were posting on the handbrake forum I didn't think that you wanted to do this.

[majorpain87]

I know I cannot recover quality that dvd shrink lost. I've always been very impressed with the results of dvd shrink. DVD backups look just as good as the originals. I figured I could at least capture the same quality of the dvd backup into the video file if I make a high quality rip. But, I still want a smaller file than the dvd.

I've considered copying the dvd to my hard drive because it's already less than 4.6 GB. If a dvd rip of equal quality comes out with anything larger than 2 GB it's not really worth it. A dvd iso on my hard drive is better because it has the same quality and includes the dvd menu and special features.

Do you think it's possible for handbrake to make a rip of the compressed dvd less than 2 GB without a noticeable change in quality? I prefer a dvd rip instead of the iso but not if it will result in an obvious decrease of quality.

[creamyhorror]

Get the original DVDs and encode from those.

[majorpain87]

Get the original DVDs and encode from those.

Can you explain your reasoning for this? Ideally I should rip directly from the original, of course. Have you experimented with rips made from backups and rips made from originals? Could you see major differences in quality? It's more convenient for me to just rip from the backup because I already have those. I just want to know if I'm sacrificing a significant amount of quality by ripping from a backup.

[Chris_BBR]

Although you say you're bothered about quality, it seems you're not bothered enough to go back to the original DVDs. In which case, as 'quality' is ultimately down to issues of personal judgement, why not just have a go at encoding some samples and see for yourself if playback quality is 'good enough' for what you need in this instance, instead of asking other people to second guess what's good enough?

Cheers, Chris

[mtherault]

Get the original DVDs and encode from those.

Can you explain your reasoning for this? Ideally I should rip directly from the original, of course. Have you experimented with rips made from backups and rips made from originals? Could you see major differences in quality? It's more convenient for me to just rip from the backup because I already have those. I just want to know if I'm sacrificing a significant amount of quality by ripping from a backup.

Yes, I have done this many times.... The rips made from shrinked backups vary in quality greatly. Some of those just had to be extracted from the dvd, and stripped of all the extra features, and it was the same quality as the original. Others however, you could see horrible pixilation. Even people that normally wouldn't notice it saw how bad these backups were. I have actually taken dvds, used shrink, encoded them, then re-encoded them back to DVD format just to see what you would lose. Let me tell you its not pretty. Going from H.264 back to MPEG4-2 is not a fun day in the park.

The reason that all of us say grab the originals is because its takes a huge variable out of the equation. Encoding movies is full of variables. Choices that have to be made. Original source shouldn't be one of them. That variable should be taken out.

Also I agree with Chris_BBR's comment greatly. I honestly don't know why you are arguing with people when I gave you the answer that you "needed" in the second post on this board. Set handbrake to 65, for Constant quality and call it a day.

However, in reading you post over and over again. If you don't care about size just make an MKV out of the thing, and don't even use handbrake. The MKV container format is capable of holding MPEG4-2 content with no issue.

The reason I suggested that you use 65 is because I thought that you wanted to actually transcode the thing. Considering this is on the "handbrake forum".

[majorpain87]

Get the original DVDs and encode from those.

Can you explain your reasoning for this? Ideally I should rip directly from the original, of course. Have you experimented with rips made from backups and rips made from originals? Could you see major differences in quality? It's more convenient for me to just rip from the backup because I already have those. I just want to know if I'm sacrificing a significant amount of quality by ripping from a backup.

Yes, I have done this many times.... The rips made from shrinked backups vary in quality greatly. Some of those just had to be extracted from the dvd, and stripped of all the extra features, and it was the same quality as the original. Others however, you could see horrible pixilation. Even people that normally wouldn't notice it saw how bad these backups were. I have actually taken dvds, used shrink, encoded them, then re-encoded them back to DVD format just to see what you would lose. Let me tell you its not pretty. Going from H.264 back to MPEG4-2 is not a fun day in the park.

The reason that all of us say grab the originals is because its takes a huge variable out of the equation. Encoding movies is full of variables. Choices that have to be made. Original source shouldn't be one of them. That variable should be taken out.

Also I agree with Chris_BBR's comment greatly. I honestly don't know why you are arguing with people when I gave you the answer that you "needed" in the second post on this board. Set handbrake to 65, for Constant quality and call it a day.

However, in reading you post over and over again. If you don't care about size just make an MKV out of the thing, and don't even use handbrake. The MKV container format is capable of holding MPEG4-2 content with no issue.

The reason I suggested that you use 65 is because I thought that you wanted to actually transcode the thing. Considering this is on the "handbrake forum".

Well, I should add something the make me intentions more clear. I currently have a standard def TV but I plan to get an HDTV sometime soon. I'm sure some low quality stuff will look fine on my SD TV but will look pretty bad on an HDTV. I want some other opinions because I don't think I can accurately test the quality with my SD TV.

Of course I care about size; if I didn't I would just use the dvd iso's.

Thank you for sharing your experiences with transcoding dvd backups. I will keep in mind the degree of compression that dvd shrink had to make in order to make the dvd. I don't think my dvd backups were compressed too heavily so I should be able to make some decent quality rips.

[TedJ]

DVD Shrink, while still very popular, doesn't have a good reputation when it comes to quality... the requantization engine it uses is quite primitive. Unless you've done a feature only extraction with the 2-pass option, you'll definitely be sacrificing significant quality compared to the original source.