I'm running DVD Shrink to try and reduce a 3-disc set down to one DVD-R. I tried increasing the compression as much as possible but It comes up a few percentage points short.
It's South Park: the complete first season and I'm not worried about the quality being hurt (if you've ever seen episodes made with Divx you'd know what I'm talking about.)
Is there a way to override this with DVD Shrink? If I ran deep analysis would that free up more room for compression?
If not, is there another ripper/encoder that can help?
Tried that but I get the same result--not enough compression. I'd like to use the crop tool to cut out the "chats" by Matt and Trey. That would free up a lot of room. Only problem is the preview window (in DVD Shrink 3.2) hasn't worked at all since I installed it. The one that pops up during analysis always works. I've read some other threads and saw one said to install the new DirectX, but that still didn't work. The help file doesn't work either.
Why not download a trial version of Nero 6.6
( www.Nero.com ) The same person who created Shrink now works for Nero. It looks and acts the same as Shrink and has the preview window and you can cut out the parts you were talking about. If it works then you know its something with your system and Shrink.
As far as the preview window thing goes, I found another thread that suggested changing the direct x video renderer (under preferences>preview) from "system default" to "built-in software" and that solved the problem.
As far as my other concern, I actually found a way to compress everything (3 discs) down to 4.5GB. My first mistake was trying to encode each disc one by one to about 1.5GB (1/3 of 4.5GB). In hindsight, Shrink must have figured all that compression wasn't necessary considering the amount of space left over.
Once I had all three discs on the hard drive, hoping for a 2-disc set, I tried the re-author and kept adding titles. I got more with the automatic compression than I had before trying to use the custom ratio. I guess the moral of the story is DVD Shrink will do whatever it takes to fit as much video as it can onto a disc.
So I can burn the episodes as separate titles, but I'd rather have a menu so I tried using Nero so that I could add a menu, but for some reason after I add the video files, it says it will take up 13 gigs or something like that. It's like it's not compressed at all. I thought maybe I had added the wrong files, but I double-checked. I also got some funny alerts, saying I would need to upgrade Nero or purchase plug-ins for the audio. I've given up on it for the moment, but I'd still like a nice menu on the finished product. I'm just throwing this out there in case someone's had the same problem.
Thanks for your help.
P.S. There isn't a guide for doing the video stuff with Nero is there?
