Originally posted by royham7: what exactly is dvd rebuilder and how to use it and what exactly is it used for
DVD RB is an encoder for movies. It differs from transcoders such as DVD Shrink, Nero Recode, CloneDVD, DVD Fab, etc. There are many one click transcoders available. In fact most of your one click transcoders are very accessible with a simple search.
DVD RB (known as DVD Rebuilder) is an encoder. To simplify the difference between encoding and transcoding is really pretty simple. You will not find too much difference between a transcoded DVD vs. an encoded DVD if the percentage of the transcode is above 70%. However, with fast action films, even 70% will show a little degradation. Transcoding suffers in the shrinkage of DVD material. Where encoding has little degradation of the original copy of the DVD.
To put it more plainly, a DVD which has 7 GB of information transcoded to 4.4 GB of information is going to lose quality. However, a 7 GB DVD encoded to a 4.4 GB of information is going to have considerably less degradation. IE: Using DVD Shrink with high quality media I set the preferences to 4440 MB where as 4.7 GB is equal to 4464 MB. Hopefully that made since to you.
With DVD RB I encode many of my DVD's, but not all of them. By the time I use a program to strip, delete, and remove items that I do not want on the DVD, and then change the menu's to only show what is available, then in many cases DVD Shrink or another transcoder will work perfect for me. However, if the final size of the DVD can not be shrunk at 70% or higher then I use DVD RB.
Problems with DVD RB:
1) Depending on the speed of your processor and the amount of memory that you have running DVD RB will take a considerable amount of time to encode. For example: to transcode the DVD will take you about 30 minutes, but to encode it will take 1 hour.
2) What quality of encoder are you using, and how will the final result differ? That is something that different people have different opinions. However, regardless if you are using a free HCC encoder vs. a paid for encoder like CCE, the overall quality is very highly approved by any and all DVD backup enthusiast.
Great things about DVD RB:
1) There is a Batch mode that may be used, and even though it does not speed up the process, your movies will continue to backup with Batch mode enabled.
The big thing about DVD RB and setting it up is to make sure that you have the latest AviSynth installed, and to make sure that your CCE, HCC, or other encoder is correctly set up before you do the install of DVD RB or that you learn how to point the menu's in the correct position.
I hope that gave you a little understanding of the difference between transcoding and encoding. Many people like the plain and simple 1 click copy even though they are not getting the best quality.
