TMPGEnc vs. DVDShrink

• 5. Hard/Unable to find any difference at 2X.
• 4. Easy to find any difference at 2X, not that annoying.
• 3. Hard to find any difference at 1X, but easy at 2X. Annoying differences.
• 2. Visible differences at 1X.
• 1. Annoyingly differences at 1X.
• 0. Sucks big BIG BIG BIG time. Yuck!

	TMPGEnc VBR	TMPGEnc CBR	DVDShrink 2.3	DVDShrink 3.0.5beta
	5	3	2	3
	5	4	4	4
	5	3	1	2
	5	2	2	5
	4	2	1	2
	5	5	4	5
Total:	29/30	19/30	14/30	21/30

With no surprise, TMPGEnc in VBR mode is the clear winner. with an overall ranking of 29/30, it clearly is a very good - if not excellent - option, quality-wise. I kind of expected TMPGEnc CBR to be still better than DVDShrink... It turns out that the latest DVDShrink is a little better overall. That is impressive. DVDShrink 2.3 is just a mess. Stay away from it if you need any knid of recompression.

From an ease-of-use standpoint, well, not much to be said. DVDShrink is this 10-click software that is lightning fast compared to TMPGEnc (2 hours to copy the DVD, one for the deep analysis, ont for the encoding). TMPGEnc is just part of a chain of complex products you have to use when you back-up a DVD. One pass take 38 hours in Highest Quality and 6.5 hours in Normal quality. And that is not the only program to use. Not to mention it is not free.
So:

• There is a way to back-up a movie such as Star Wars II with a very minimal loss. When I say minimal, I mean hard to distinguish from the original with a X2 magnifier. That should satisfy all video freaks.
• If you go the TMPGEnc way, you would just be a fool not to use it in the two-pass VBR mode. A fool I am no more. I have to admit I used it in CBR mode High Quality, believing that the extra 30 hours were worth it ;-)
• If you use DVDShrink 2.3, just stop right now! and switch to the version 3.0.5! That is actually the reason for these pages.
• You should have enough information now to make your own choice

I am planning on running the same kind of test with a much lower bitrate. The problem of this test is that TMPGEnc was really at ease with a rather high 3580 kbps bitrate. I will try something like 2.5MB/s or lower to see how TMPGEnc degrades when short on bits.