Let's say you have a DVD ripped successfully to your hard drive. You then open it with DVDshrink to see if it is too large to fit on a DVD-R and needs to be shrunk or not. You see that the size is aok and no shrinkage is necessary.
If you then use the DVDshrink "backup" button anyways, to either create an ISO, or hard disk folder, it then says it is "encoding"....
My question is - what does this mean? What is being "encoded"? Isn't the original ripped directory structure fine to use as is for burning from? And does this encoding reduce quality in any way???
The reason I am asking this is because in the past I always HAD to do this "backup" step whether or not the DVD needed to be shrunk, because I was using IMGBURN for burning and that program required an IMG file (which I had DVDshrink create for me). But I recently found out that there is a new version of IMGBURN (which I am now using), and that new version can now burn from DVD folders instead of only IMG files. So I am wondering why/if I still need to do the "backup" step, and if I do do it, am I losing any quality.
You don't need to do the backup in Shrink if there's nothing to shrink. Just burn the files directly with ImgBurn.
If you want to create an ISO file, then use ImgBurn for that as well because ImgBurn produces a better ISO. To prove this tou can try a test. Once you have the files ready, defrag your hard drive. Now use Shrink to make an ISO file. Check your fragmentation and you will see that the ISO file is fragmented. Now delete that ISO file and make one with ImgBurn and check your fragmentation again. You will see that the ImgBurn ISO is not fragmented. What does that mean? It means that your pc will not have to search all over your hard drive for the bits and pieces for burning. That means your pc will not have to work so hard.
Never mind about Shrink saying Encoding. It doesn't encode.
If the resulting Video_TS folder is less than 4400MB(4350 would be better), then you can directly use ImgBurn, skip the DVD Shrink step.
If you do use DVD Shrink, no quality loss, since there is no compression.
