I'm having problems with the new 1.1.1 software. I have copied numerous discs with 1.0.2, and while there was some blockiness, overall I had excellant results. With 1.1.1 I get so much blockiness that the copy is almost unwatchable. This happens in both movie-only and full-disc modes. I am using DVD Decrypter to decrypt the movie first. The movie I was trying to copy was GREY ZONE. After several attempts I went back and used 1.0.2 and it worked perfectly. Any ideas?

Ian

Yes I noticed it too. I did a 1:1 copy of a 5.2 GB DVD so there is not too much compression. It was 'blocky' compared to the original. I tried it also with a bigger sized DVD of 7.5GB. There the results were much better then before, less blocky then the one I did with the old version.

hmmm, strange....

like i've said in another thread, a very long movie (2,5h) resulted for me in a almost perfect quality. there is almost no blockiness visible.

i didn't try a smaller, shorter movie though. i hope 1.11 doesn't have a problem with those.

maybe ReneB could comment on that...

I sure can, and like explained before, our initial tought while developing DVD2one was that we wanted a program ourselves that could make movie only backups of DVD's who nearly fitted on a DVD-R.

Movies who where about 1Gb to big in size, and the goal was to make a engine who could do that under 15 minutes on my machine. Needless to say we where succesfull in that.

But to use DVD2one on very long movies like LOTR or DAS BOOT isn't really a very good idea because the playlength is so long that the available bitrate in the original movie is to low for DVD2one to maintain a certain quality.

Remember DVD2one is a compressor not an encoder like CCE!

But since more and more people are looking for a good solution even for longer movies we deciced to make some changes in the engine.
The first changes where made in the 1.1.x engine (current release) the next change is planned for the 1.2.x engine and will be a more statistics based engine and thereby more accurate in everything.

But we will never reach the quality which CCE could do in multipass encoding, even if we implented multipass encoding (which would be rather useless since our engine isn't based on that system)
CCE is an encoder and analyses every single frame and then builds a completely new data set (i,p,b frame) and DVD2one bases the compression on the already avaible data!

That doesn't mean the quality can't be improved!
But comparing DVD2one with CCE is like comparing an apple with a pear, both fruit yet very different!

The Grey Zone while being a pretty bare bones disk has the movie authored with a very high Bit rate. The movie itself is about 7 megs sans extras. And basically when you start compressing a movie that large the blockiness will occur. DVD2One really does better with movies in the 4.8-6.5 meg range. Actually I'm amazed at the bit rates of some of these films. Maid in Manhattan has both version of the movie on the same disk so each version is around 3.6 meg. DVD2One does a great job on it because it's not really compressing anything. I'm amazed that these low bit rate movies look as good as they do. Imagine how good it would look if the movie was 7 meg with a higher bitrate.

But why would the 1.0.2 version give me a very good copy, while the 1.1.1 gives me a terrible copy? I know the file size of the movie was very large, but it still looks good when copied with the old software. I have never had a bad looking copy with version 1.0.2, and that includes my backup of Lord of the Rings, which I copied as a test for very long movies and was very surprised by the excellent results.

On the other hand, I did a full disk copy with the new software of THE RING, and every looked excellent.

I guess I'll just have to keep both versions of the software on my computer, and learn to be happy with the occasional movie only copy.

Ian

I think I have seen slight more blockiness on larger movies with the new version. I think you hit the nail on the head. I'll use the 1.1.1 when doing full movies and 1.0.2 for movie only.

fellow dvders (great english eh) i agree.
I have made backups of blade 2 movie only ,one with v1.0.2 and one with 1.1.1 .....guess what i got major blockiness from 1.1.1 where as 1.0.2 i couldnt tell the difference from the original.
Same results with lord of the rings which is a huge film.

Rene or anyone else .......any answers or reasons for this ?

its not a huge problem but i would like to make full disk backups eventually?

superb program by the way,there is nothing out there to touch it.

I to have backed up Blade 2 plus 15 other DVDs with version 1.1.1 but, i dont have any blockiness in any of these movies. I use Verbatim 4x DVD+R media and these are all done in movie only format. I can't tell any difference in quality from the original DVDs. What type of blank media are you using.

Oh by the way great program.

I did LOTR and it looked awesome....

2Sweet

hello..im using datawrite 1 speed as i only have 1 speed drive but the media type doesnt explain why i get perfect results with the old 1.0.2 version (same media)?

endbringer

If you cannot tell the difference from a dvd2one copy and the original movie. I'm thinking eye exam!

later

I've done Black Hawk Down (movie only) with the new 1.11 and its fantastic quality - right up to the end. Just my Spiderman full disc copy I can't get to work.

I seem to remember that the original DVD2one compression engine had a problem at times keeping the average bitrate across the length of a film - i.e. it tended to compress the film more towards the end (as it began to run out of space) to fit into the available 4.36gig. Sometimes the beginning of the film enjoyed a comparitavely small amount of compression and so looked really good!

As far as I can tell (and I'm sure Rene or Erwin will correct me if I'm wrong!) the latest engine makes a much better job of distributing the compression throughout the film/full backup. This has the effect, on the whole, of a better overall looking backup but the downside being that the beginning of the film can on occasion look worse than if you had used DVD2one 1 or 1.0.1/2 to compress it.

augeri,

Have you tried checking the end of the film on both the 1.0.2 and the 1.1.1 versions of backups? It would be interesting to know if my supposition is correct that the further into the film you go the better looking the 1.1.1 version of the film would look compared to the 1.0.2 version.

JMP

I did LOTR extended edition where the movie is on 2 DVD`s.

I used V1.1.1 in full disc mode with output size set to 4350 and the output quality was great.

*** Make sure you set output size because if you dont, the program used 3 gigs*** By default, DVD-R output size is set to 100MB and if you dont change it, the program produce 3gigs outputs... Maybe that could explain some people poor output quality.

well that would make sense because you're spreading the movie across two disks instead of compressing 7.5 gig on one disk.

jmp1963

I watched the movie only backup of Grey Zone done with the 1.0.2 version and the quality seamed to be fairly constant throughout the entire movie. Some minor blockiness in low light scenes, but nothing worse than what I've seen before.

I did notice that the movie only backup done with 1.1.1 did get better as it played, but the first half hour or so was very ugly - very blocky, with shifting picture. It really was unwatchable - worse than very bad VHS.

BTW - I did back up the full disc of The Ring with 1.1.1 and it looked very good throughout. I also did movie only back-ups of Femme Fatale using both versions of dvd2one and both copies looked very comparable. I'm sorry, but I didn't check the original file sizes. I would have expected the Ring to look terrible because if was a full disc backup. I don't think the original file size of Femme Fatale is too large because there are a lot of extras on the disc.

I hope this helps

Thanks for your reply and observations augeri,

I still have all versions of DVD2one 'tucked away' (being an old hand of nearly a quarter of a century of 'computing' I don't take any chances!) and may well dig them out if I have any 'bad' experiences myself

Cheers,

JMP