I have a 50" pioneer kuro display and I upconvert my dvd's with either a HD-A2 or PS3 over HDMI, now that my PC is vista w/ nero8 i can't use dvdshrink anymore so i'm using dvdfab with the data size set to 4450mb... am i alone in thinking the image quailty ISN'T as good as a 2 pass through shrink?

I can still use dvdshrink on my vista.

update Nero to the newest version, then reinstalled DVD Shrink, and then after that it should work. from what ive read it seems the problem is with the combo of shrink with nero, not shrink itself. so if you cant get shrink/nero to work use ImgBurn for writing.

but can anyone agree dvdshrink produces better copies than dvdfab or am i just used to my awesome display and hd-dvd/bluray hence forgetting how horrible dvd was in the first place?

probably. as dvd is only 480

I just compared the original "transformers" dvd with a backup i just made on dvdfab 4.1.2.0 with main movie and main audio track selected only, this came out to 70% (30% compressed) and the end result is a LOT more noise and artifacting on the backup plus overall much softer

so i guess i wonder, when dvdfab does a backup with 0 compression (100%) would they be identical?

BoostFrenzy no matter which program you use you will notice the image is not good. your entertainment setup will bring out the flaws in the backups. seeing them on a 50inch screen upconverted would be better using the originals for that.

Yo-

I find that using high grade media (Verbatim or Taiyo Yuden) that my copies - run thru a Toshiba A3 to my Hitichi UltraVision 57 inch PHDTV are of great quality with little or no noise - using DVD Fab Gold-eh

(would also recommend setting the disc size to 4300 - to prevent getting close to the outter edge with the burn)

yeah with no compression they should be identical...what kind of discs were you using...i'm surprised you got bad results with that compression

yeah OP never said what blanks they were using. What speed they burned them at. What drive and firmware they used to burn with........can we get some more details please.

i'm using a 20A4P drive with the latest whatever patched firmware, burning at 12x, the media brand/type escapes me, but on a quality test there's <12pie and <3pif, they aren't skipping or playing unreliably... but the 30% compression offers to my eyes, a big hit in image quality, then again my SD-DVD copy of transformers looks 8x worse than the HD-DVD version I have in the first place... I could be just being paranoid

For instance in the scene in the beginning of chapter 3 where they pan and zoom onto the high school building, the building has more jaggies and lacks cleanliness compared to the original (although the original doesn't look that great either), this is playing with a PS3 at normal upscale, 1080p via HDMI cable to display

do i really need to step back to 4300mb? i've used 4450 for years (shrink defaults to 4464)

cant wait for the day that HD-DVD/Bluray backups are economical!

You could use Split mode and put it on 2 discs. Then there is no compression.

Yeah or use DVD9's

did you shrink it with dvdshrink and compare it with the original?

not yet, nero8 doesn't work right with shrink and i need to install anydvd, burn with imgburn etc to do that, just noticed dvdfab doesn't have many options for handling compression (always used 2 pass and shaprening in shrink)

me too!!

ok you dont need to buy any software. use dvdfab decrypter to rip, use shrink to compress, then use imgburn to write.

you can have dvdshrink auto open imgburn. select dvd decrypter in the burn settings of dvd shrink. then in the dvddecrypter directory and place a copy of the imgburn .exe in the folder and rename it dvddecrypter.

C:\Program Files\DVD Decrypter\dvddecrypter.exe

read more here.

http://forum.digital-digest.com/showthread.php?t=59242