After I saw a post here about DVD Shrink, I tried it once, and IMMEDIATELY fell in love with it. I uninstalled DVD Xcopy. DVD shrink, in my opinion, is much, much better. It gives you a lot more control, and it gives you better feedback on what is going on..
I do have a problem with DVD shrink, though..
I tried to back-up my copy of Wonderland (the John Holmes flick) and it acts a little strange..
Let me start by telling you what I did. I got rid of the French audio, but kept everything else. DVD Shrink said it has to compress by about 50% -- I am willing to live with that.. Buuut...
When ever there is a scene change (Probly when a new I frame is generated in the MPEG stream) the movie -screen hiccups for just a second. It is slight, but very, very irritating. The new scene is not pixelized, it just "freezes" for an instant.. and then it continues..
it's the 50% compression. you need to get rid of more stuff. What I would do if you just can't get rid of stuff is change the compression of the various extras. you can make some of the extras more compressed and thus have to use less compression on the movie that matters. With that amount of compression, you should use deep analysis.
I would probably say the compression has something to do with it since I am not as experienced with the mechanics behind DVD Shrink, but I had the same problem only on certain dvd players. My stand alone Sony would hiccup or freeze at every chapter change, but my computer and my PS2 would run it fine. Weird, but definitely easing up on the compression is good - I try to never dip below 60%, and if I really have to I always use deep analysis, especially on movies with a lot of fast action.
On the one hand, the fact that it happens only at scene changes does make me suspicious of DVD Shrink, except that it seems like it should happen more often if that's the culprit because scene changes aren't the only places you get I frames. There should be 2-3 I frames every second.
On the other hand, I agree with Oriphus about the media. In fact, judging from some of the posts I've seen in here in the last few months, I'd say that even if it is DVD Shrink causing the problem, it could be something that wouldn't cause a problem with good media like Ritek G04. I can't speak from personal experience because I don't ever use tools like Shrink to compress, and I only use good Ritek media.
