Is the quality of video encoded using CCE comparible to that of DVD-quality? I am worried because I am a real perfectionist when it comes to image and sound quality and rather not lose $6 on a DVD-R for bad quality video... I'd much rather go out and buy another copy of the movie in the store for $15-20. So is it something that I will notice when I pop it into my settop dvd player?
I have been able to succesfully copy several movies (on Sony DVD-R media $$$) without encoding and all this other stuff and the quality is great... but for those movies which are larger than 4.7g, I am curious to know....
-eh
ps- On a side note, what brand of DVD-R media is best for this type of thing? Are princo DVD-R's any good? Because I purchased a spindle of no-name DVD-R's only to convert them into coasters for my coffee mugs...
Well, re-encoding always drops the quality, as we're really talking about lossy formats -- MPEG-2 is lossy (DVD is itself a lossy already, not even near perfect). So, it really depends on many aspects, but I can only say "try it and see if you like it".
i saw some colored artifacts when i re-encoded Silence of the Lambs (using Rempeg2), on the first 2-3 minutes. The rest of the movie was perfect! but i think it depends also on the quality of your tv set, the screen size, and your point of view :)
I use princo's on my Sony settop , though i buy them 3.60euro/each, not a good price for medium quality dvd-r , i think...
CCE allows for multi-pass VBR (up to 9 passes) and the quality does improve as you increase the number of passes (and also the encoding time). Try it and see if it acceptable to you. I've encoded video longer than 2-hours via CCE with 4 or 5 pass VBR and the results have been very pleasing (to me, anyway).
This fella's done quite a bit of testing with cce.
I did notice a difference with cce when heavily pushing the VBR with SVCDs, so perhaps the difference is only visible with (very) low bitrate video. Sorry for that bit of dis-information guys.
My encodes will be much shorter in future, I tell you!!!
True -- more "impossible" the encoding task is, more the number of passes effects to the quality. So, complex video with desired bitrate of 600kbps will probably cause visible difference between 5-pass and 6-pass encoding. But anyway, no one does that :-)
I've settled down to 4-pass encoding -- which with my antique P3/500 takes slightly longer than forever :-)
