TAG | DVD Shrink
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Issue on DVD to Great Quality Video with Small Size
0 Comments | Posted by Bob in Multimedia
AVCHD (Advanced Video Coding High Definition) is a high compression codec based on H.264, which is good at presenting videos with great quality and good file size. It is designed to be compatible with Blu-ray Disc format and can be used for authoring and distributing of high definition video on DVD media. The file size of a DVD can be reduced by half if the DVD is converted to AVCHD format.
Then, why not backup the DVD 9 movie into AVCHD to fit on a DVD 5 disc, instead of shrinking the DVD to DVD 5 using DVD Shrink as most of us usually do? After all, AVCHD can give us much better quality. BTW the ultimate version dvd ripper is released. If you are thinking of this question, following are some facts for you to refer to:
1.An AVCHD disc requires a Blu-ray player, while a shrunken DVD with MPEG-2 codec disc can play in any DVD player.
2.DVD Shrink doesn’t re-encode the video and the process is fast, but if you shrink too much the quality suffers compared to using a good MPEG 2 encoder like DVD Rebuilder to re-encode the DVD as I talked in this article. By contrast, converting a DVD 9 to 4GB AVCHD will take much longer than shrinking or recompressing the DVD to MPEG 2, although it will give better quality.
3.You won’t get HD (high definition) video out of the conversion but SD (standard definition) video, so the quality gain you get from converting to AVCHD is not much but the time it takes is much. It may be worthwhile if you want to put two or three movies on a single disc.
Therefore, if you have a Blu-ray player and you think it is worth spending the long time to convert the DVD to AVCHD, you can do it. There are some free software tools to convert DVD to AVCHD format and multiAVCHD and Ripbot264 are the top two I will recommend.
However, if you are really after for a way to convert your DVD into HD video and small file size with fast speed, there is indeed an easy way: using TouchUp DVD Ripper Platinum. It lets you rip your DVD into HD video, with fast speed and different formats to choose from so that the output video can play in different video players. You can download it to have a try.
rip DVD to HD video with TouchUp DVD Ripper Platinum
As most commercially-released DVDs are dual layer (DVD-9 with 8.5GB), we often use DVD Shrink to compress the DVD by re-encoding and/or discarding extra content such as foreign-language soundtracks so as to fit on a single layer DVD (DVD-5 with 4.7 GB), since dual layer DVDs are expensive and even unavailable in some places. However, there is such problem as the following description when using DVD Shrink to shrink the DVD:
Problem
“I have a DVD folder with 4 episodes in 7.4GB size and I need to backup it to DVD 5, but when I run it through DVD Shrink, it could only be reduced to 4.8GB. I used the automatic compression and set my target as dvd-5 but it was to no avail. Even if I chose custom, I could not slide the compression bar back any further on any of the main movies. It didn’t allow me.”
Solution
How to solve such problem? Well, a direct solution is to run the already shrunk file through DVD Shrink again to reduce it enough to fit on a DVD-5, but the video quality may suffer and we should try to avoid compressing that much.
A better solution is to use DVD Rebuilder (free version), selecting HC encoder option. This way can preserve better quality than shrinking twice or only once but reducing size that much.
Another solution is to use MenuShrink which turns motion screen menus to still menus with or without audios. It can save up to 200MB if the menu audios are removed too.
There is also a compromising solution, that is, splitting the DVD-9 to fit on two DVD-5 (two DVD-5 is cheaper than one DVD-9). For this way, please refer to the article on splitting DVD using freeware, or directly check the “split” option in TouchUp DVD Ripper Platinum that offers you a wide range of splitting options including customized splitting by size or time (please refer to the tutorial for details).
DVD spliting in TouchUp DVD Ripper Platinum
Ripping a TV show DVD is not as simple as ripping a movie DVD, since TV show DVDs have multiple episodes and are often improperly authored, either purposely or due to incompetence. DVD converters may convert the episodes into lots of segments and you have to cut and join them to get a correct file.
Then if you want to convert an improperly authored TV show DVD into a single file in AVI which is one of the most popular video format, how to make it easier yet for free? Following is the solution. For converting each episode to an individual AVI file, please refer to this article.
Use DVD Shrink to Re-author the DVD.
1. Rip the DVD to the hard disk drive first if DVD Shrink cannot decrypt it and then open the VIDEO_TS folder in DVD Shrink.
2. Select Re-author from the top menu
3. Select the episodes you want and drag them to the left panel under the DVD structure.
4. Select Backup on the top menu and select where you want to save the result files.
DVD Shrink Re-author
There is also a detail DVD Shrink Re-author tutorial you can refer to. After the re-authoring, you get the episodes without other extras and can re-number to place the episodes in correct order for encoding and then joining.
Convert the Re-authored DVD files to AVI
Use AutoGK to convert the DVD files to AVI files:
AutoGK
Merge to One AVI file
To join the separate AVI files to one file, we can use VirtualDub. Here is the detail guide on how to do this.
The above method is easy to use but is troublesome with three steps. The easiest method is to convert the DVD to an AVI file directly in one step, by using a commercial DVD ripper which allows you to convert DVD to whatever format and meanwhile lets you choose to merge the converted files into a single one or not. This way can say you much time and what’s more important is you get the video with much better quality.
Have you ever ripped a commercial DVD and burn to a blank DVD to make a backup for yourself? If yes, what software did you use to do this work? I think most people use the free ripping tools like DVD Decrypter and DVD Shrink and then burn with freeware like ImgBurn or other burning programs.
Recently, one of my friends turned to me for help, for he couldn’t play a burned DVD in the standalone DVD player. He ripped the usual VIDEO_TS and AUDIO_TS files to his hard drive with DVD Shrink and then burned the files to a blank DVD with ImgBurn in the option of “Write files/folders to disc”, but the burned DVD couldn’t play in his standalone DVD player, though the files could normally play in his PC. He was unable to figure out what was wrong.
Have you ever met such problem, when you are backing up you DVD? Where was wrong in the whole operation in your opinion? Actually, where the shoe pitches is the ripping tool. Although the DVD files are created on your hard drive and you can play them in your PC, which seems you have ripped the DVD, it doesn’t mean the files have been ripped correctly and properly.
As we know, DVD ripping software like DVD Decrypter and DVD Shrink haven’t been under development for years, while the DVD copy-protection technology are updated constantly. Thus the outdated DVD ripping software is unable to fully and correctly decrypt the newer commercial DVD. When you use the incorrectly ripped DVD files to burn, the burned DVD cannot play in your standalone DVD player. Therefore, you need to use a DVD ripping program competent to rip the latest copy-protected DVD so that you can burn playable DVDs swimmingly.
TouchUp DVD Ripper Platinum is such a tool to break the latest DVD copy protection with constant update. It can produce excellent output video and audio quality with super speed. To know its tons of features further, please check here.
Tip: Make sure the VIDEO_TS folder of the DVD you burned is in uppercase letters only; otherwise the standalone DVD players may not find the folder.
