Why DVD transcoding is dumb

I don't understand what you are trying to say... But if i understand right you're talking about piracy? All real DVDR releases(released by some release group) are encoded with CCE not transcoded. I just backed up Asian movie with DVD Shrink. Compression ratio was 96%. You're are saying it was stupid and i should have splitted it to 2 DVD's? To me it looks like you just bought DVD burner... You don't have to transcode you can encode it with CCE to smaller size.

I back my dvd's up to watch them in the truck, when my passengers are watching movies in the truck, they don't care about perfect video quality. Its nice because my dvd's can sit in the changer at home, and I don't have to worry about one of my buddies scratching them up in the truck or whatever. DVD Shrink is a good program, I find myself cutting all the menus out of the dvd's and everything except the movie. When you cut out all the filler its so much easier to manage, pop it in and it autoplays. JH

You really did not understand my post at all did you? I am saying that transcoding (Re-encoding the MPEG2 stream) to make it fit onto a single DVDR is not a great idea. Recompression is fine for DiVX/XviD because it's the equivalent of MP3's It allows the transfer of movies at a reasonable quality onto smaller media (CD-R's) or via the internet for low to mid bandwidth users. DVDR's on the other hand are big in themselves and do not lend themselves to low to mid bandwidth users but high bandwidth users. If you are going to transfer DVD images then recompressing them by only a small amount makes no sense to me. If I want a DVD image I wasn an NON-RECOMPRESSED image with all the extras stripped out. If it still does not fit on 1 DVDR so be it. Just split it. All these people talking about 30% recompression with DVD Shrink and CCE etc well...it may be fine for taking out to your car or loaning to a friend or for the kids but for anything else I'd rather it be the exact same untouched MPEG2 VOB's that were on the original DVD thanks (Minus extraneous crap and protections of course). Of course thinking on what I have written it mainly refers to stuff I really should not be talking about on this forum so I will leave it at that and if the mods want to lock this thread or delete it I will leave it to them. I was just ranting :)

just from a theoretical standpoint, downloading 4.3 or 8.5 GB, there's a definite difference in time. And your comparison to MP3 is flawed. Audio CDs are lossless. To be able to compare DivX to audio CDs, you'd have to use an uncompressed 100+GB video as the source (and uncompressed 6 ch PCM sound). On a more practical note, you are talking about things we don't talk about here.