I've always preferred DVD Shrink 3 to Nero Recode 2, as Shrink seemed to be ahead on features, speed and had a better GUI.

But now Shrink is no longer developed, has Recode overtaken it?

I've not really seen much in the ChangeLog for Recode other than bugfixes lately.

Is there an equivalent to Shrink's sharpening in Recode?

As far as Recode lacking decryption/ripping goes, I will soon (if Slysoft pulls it's finger out) have AnyDVD, and currently use DVD Decrypter for ripping anyway, and I always burn using Nero.

I'm happy enough with Shrink, but am I missing out on something by not using Recode?

If i am not mistaken the author od shrink is also the author of recode (working for ahead) and hence had to stop devpt. of shrink. I have used both. I currently use the combination of AnyDVD/Alcohol/Recode. Recode seems to be better in terms of image quality with 20% or greater compression. This is absolutely perceptual and relative. Hope this helps.

Yeah, I know about the same author thing, but was just wondering if there are features in Shrink that he never put into Recode (like opening ISOs).

Tried AnyDVD and Recode last night and Recode did recompressed two DVD's in 8 minutes each, whereas Shrink would usually take about 15 with the same settings.

Although the "advanced analysis/two pass" thing seems to be buggy - it actually shrunk the DVD down to a horrible-quality 2.5Gb!

Also, I'm not sure if it was Recode or AnyDVD's fault, but PowerDVD 6 kept crashing when trying to play the resulting output if I used FFWD or Skip Track.

If PowerDVD *crashes*, it's *always* a bug in PowerDVD, period, end of story.

Why not use Rebuilder? If quality is the issue, it's superior to both.

I concur with Mr. Horse. The quality you will acheive with DVD Rebuilder is superior to any transcoder out there.

It takes more time to encode but the quality difference is amazing, especially on highly compressed movies like the LOTR movies.

Regards,