In watching numerous original dvds on my [year old] laptop with its good quality widescreen, I notice compression artifacts fairly frequently in those dvds. Furthermore, such movies aren't necessarily long, or compressed to at or below 4.5 gigs. Yet in different movies that have been compressed with dvdshrink maybe 25% or so [with reasonable quality settings], I don't notice additional compression artifacts -- and sometime don't notice any at all. This leads me to be quite impressed with the quality of the compression in dvdshrink.
So....I'm wondering, is dvdshrink actually of a better quality than some of the compression utilities that the studios are using? It's hard to imagine, since it's free.....
This is probably a long-shot, but, I wonder if using dvdshrink to compress a movie slightly might actually improve the visual quality of a poorly compressed original movie. I think I'll try it
I do not think that true original disks have any compression. Have you tried to view them on a larger TV with a stanalone DVD player. Could the artifacts you are seeing be related to your laptop DVD drive and/or the playback software. The fact you see little additional artifacts on a DVD compressed to 75% (25% compression from the original) on a small screen doesn't seem that unusual.
The studios generally do not do compression as done by Shrink and others. They use multiple disks, two sided disks, dual layer disks or a combination of these to fit the larger movies to avoid this.
I seriously doubt that compressing a moveie with Shrink could improve the viewing quality, in fact the oposite is usually seen by most.
Dvd shrink is far from being the best compression utility but it is the best free transcoding app that I am aware of and no it can not improve the quality over the original pressed dvd.
From what I've seen, CloneDVD 2 (DVD Cloner?) or whatever it's called has the best...I got a copy of The Life Aquatic and was amazed by the picture quality.
Shrink's is excellent...even without Deep Analyzing and Error Compression ripping, or at least Armageddon looked great without it (at least I think it didn't have those done to it).
