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High Quality DVD-9 Backups With DVD Rebuilder & CCE Basic

Up until now, there have basically been 2 choices available for backing up an entire DVD-9 to a DVD-/+R. You could either use a laundry list of programs, probably including some with a fairly steep learning curve and maybe some that cost thousands of dollars, or you could use a 1 Click program that doesn't give you the same quality as more complex methods, but doesn't require hundreds of hours of reading and experimentation or thousands of dollars worth of software. With DVD Rebuilder and CCE Basic (and a couple of other free programs) you can now get quality that rivals the difficult/expensive methods while keeping the simplicity of the 1 Click software.
How Good Can It Be?

One of the advantages of DVD Rebuilder is that it allows you to use Cinema Craft Encoder, generally considered the best MPEG-2 encoder available, to re-encode video. If you've done some research on the subject, you may have thought it would be nice to use CCE, except for 2 things. First of all, everybody knows CCE SP is a $2000 program, and if you consider how many DVDs you could replace for that much money, buying it doesn't make much sense. What many people don't know is that there's another version of CCE that costs less than $100 ($58 as of the writing of this guide). It doesn't have all the advanced features of CCE SP, but it uses the same encoding engine. I've done many backups with both programs, and except in cases of extreme compression (where some of CCE SP's advanced features become important), I can't tell the difference. The second barrier for a novice is complexity. You may have downloaded a trial version, looked at all the options, and decided there was too much to learn. This is where DVD Rebuilder really shines. The only thing you need to know about CCE is how to install it. Rebuilder will do everything else for you.
Things To Remember

DVD Rebuilder is currently beta software. While it already works great in most cases, there are still a few bugs that need fixed and there are some discs that it can't backup yet. As of right now, DVD Rebuilder can't handle multiple angles. In English, that means that if you have a DVD with different versions of the same movie that have the same aspect ratio but some of the scenes are different, it probably can't back it up yet. This includes many Disney DVDs. There are also a lot of advanced options that haven't been added to the program yet. Fortunately, none of this should stop you from backing up most DVDs, just be aware that it is beta software (and donation-ware) so there are no guarantees.

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What's the difference between DVD-RB and Other 1 Click programs?

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What's wrong with DVD Shrink?

Over the course of the past couple of years DVD ripping techniques have changed dramatically. Newer "one click" programs have made backing up a DVD a fairly simple process... but there is a significant trade-off. The quality that can be attained by even the best of these programs is poor in comparison to original techniques that used Cinemacraft Encoder, HC Encoder, QuEnc, or other top-notch encoders. The reason is simple. When using one of these encoders the picture is rebuilt from scratch and optimized for the resulting bitrate. One-touch transcoders usually drop DCT coefficients or change quantization info in order to lower the bitrate. This can result in pixelation and poor overall picture quality.

But, they sure are convenient.

That's where DVD ReBuilder (DVD-RB) comes in. This program was built to bridge the gap between the incredibly easy but limited "one-click" solutions and the incredibly complex but high-quality methods of DVD ripping and backup.

Another advantage of DVD-RB when compared to older methods is that it doesn't require access to an expensive authoring package. DVD-RB includes its own reauthoring engine that reconstructs the DVD in a way compatible with its original design.

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What's the difference between DVD Shrink and DVD Rebuilder?


DVD Shrink is a transcoding program. Transcoding or more specifically Compressed-domain Transcoding means normally a re-encoding process that changes the video or audio features, such as resolution or bitrate, by changing parts of the a/v content, but not by reconstructing the content again (which is the case in encoding process). Compressed-domain transcoding also maintains the format of the file same as in the original file. Transcoding doesn't encode it takes out small bits of detail to make the DVD video smaller. Faster then encoding.

DVD Rebuilder can be used as both an encoding and transcoding program by using different modes and is a good program to re-encode a DVD. Encoding is the process of changing data from one form into another according to a set of rules specifiec by a codec. Often the encoding is done to make a file compatible with specific hardware (such as a DVD Player) or to compress or reduce the space the data occupies.

Encoding will give you a better picture quality when you need to 'shrink' your original DVD down to a very low bit rate.


Bit rates

Another common word in the encoding world. Generally, higher bit rates allow for higher quality, because more information is moved.

Think of bit rate as water coming out of a hose. If each drop of water in the stream of water leaving the hose is a single bit, then as you turn up the water pressure more bits are passed along. When the hose is turned down low only a trickle of water is moved meaning that few bits of water are moving resulting in a low bit rate. When the hose is turned to its maximum pressure, a great number of water droplets or water bits are moving each second resulting in a high bit rate.

Very often people are asking about the compression percentage and what results in a good quality backup.

Put simply, it is not the compression percentage which matters but the bit rate which is devoted to the video encoding.

These bit rates should give you a clue on the quality:

1 Mbit/s ? VHS quality
5 Mbit/s ? DVD quality
10 Mbit/s ? HDTV quality
For example, if a movie was originally encoded with a "high" bit rate (say 6 Mbps - "mega bits per second") and compressed by a lot, (say to 50%), on average, this would result in a bitrate of 3 MBps.

But if the movie was originally encoded with a "low" bitrate (say 3.5 Mbps) and was compressed only by 20% (to 80%), the resulting average bitrate would be 2.8 Mbps - worse than the 50% compression!!!

Now, what you can detect as "bad quality" will most likely depend on the final bitrate and the size of your screen. If your are projecting onto a huge screen, the higher numbers are probably necessary (say over 3.5 and preferably 4.5+). But on a regular TV, you can probably get away with the 3 Mbps range (and even lower

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