Ok. First of all, I am not a fan of WinAvi as I believe this tool cannot be used by itself to create the DVD final products that I am happy with. That said, none of the tools can be used by itselfs and produce exceptable results. I have tried to encode the same movie using both TmpgEnc and CCE (both with 2 pass vbr) and found the TmpgEnc offers slightly better quality. Although TmpgEnc is considered by many the best product of the bunch, it's not perfect either. As an example, most commercial movie houses can pack a 2 hour movie encoded with an average bitrate of 7,500 or higher into a single layer DVD disk. THERE IS NO WAY YOU CAN DO THIS WITH TMPGENC without reducing the bitrate to 5,500 and below. You can't do this with CCE or WinAvi either. Secondly, TmpgEnc, CCE, or WinAvi for that matter, cannot create acceptable Dobby Digital sounds (i.e, 5 channel) or DTS etc. Thus, in that sense, WinAvi is just as good as TmpgEnc, except that WinAvi can produce the video files in 10% of the time it takes for TmpgEnc to do the same. In WinAvi, there is an option you can chose to output the highest quality at the expense of higher bitrate. Most people don't realized that WinAvi's power comes in when you combined the program with other tools. For example, say you have a PAL DVD and you want to convert it to NTSC DVD. Here's how to do it. 1). Using DVD2AVI, create a project of your PAL DVD disk. 2). Use the VFAPI Reader Codec (which by the way, came from TmpgEnc) to create a "fake" *.avi file. It should take about a min because it's just an information file. 3). Open your WinAvi program and call in this fake *.avi file. Set the quality to highest and set the option to NTSC. Don't worry about audio, as we don't care about the audio in WinAvi. 4). once this is done, use TmpgEnc or any programs you like to demux the video part from the WinAvi final product and throw out the rest. Note, the Video file is likely to be a bit large, and you will need to reduce the bitrate. 5). Now use graphedit, DVD lab or any other sound programs to demux the original sound tracks (from your PAL DVD source). 6). Use DVD lab to re-mux the video and audio back in, and bingo, you have converted your DVD from PAL to NTSC in less than 1.5 hour with high quality DVD movie. Now I will reserve my opinion on which one is the better product. That is, unless someone can shows me how to repack a PAL DVD movie to NTSC with the same bitrate using TmpgEnc
Well, commercially pressed DVD may have room for more than 4 gigs (i.e, they have the option to chose double sided disks); however, most commercially pressed final products use 4.6 gigs of info or less. You can verify this by using DVD Decryptor and copy those files into your hard drive. You can also verify the bitrate by using bitrate viewer, DVD lab and similar utility softwares. However, once you recode those *.vob files using TmpgEnc, AND keeping the average bitrate constant, you will always get a set of *.vob files that are WAY over 4.6 gig. Here is an experiment for you to try: 1). find an NTSC DVD that is 1.5 hour long and has no more than 4.7 gigs of info; copy all the *.vob files into your hard drive. Then make a note of the average bitrate. 2). Use TmpgEnc to reencode those *.vob files, all the while holding the average bitrate constant. I will guarantee you that after the re-encoding process, you will not be able to put back those *.vob files into a single sided DVD without running out of room. Putting the resulting files into a double sided DVD with over 8 gigs of capacity not with standing. I am not picking on TmpgEnc alone, as I mentioned previously, none of the softwares (i.e, TmpgEnc, CCE, WinAvi) can do re-encode the *.vob files while keeping the average bitrate the same. Sure you can reduce the average bitrate and make the *.vob files fit on a single sided disk, but you are trading off quality.
I think you need to check your DVD's again. I also think you need to understand bitrate, and how it relates to filesize, including audio.
Perhaps I didn't explain it clearly enough. The DVD disk size (single, double) is irrelevant in this discussion. File size and average bitrate is what is relevant here. Noted I didn't say constant bitrate, I said keeping the OVERALL average bitrate roughly the same through out the entire encoding (i.e., redistributing higher bitrates to fast motion scenes is allowed at the expense of lower bitrates somewhere else in the movie). Thus, That means overall the average bitrate of the copied DVD should be roughly the same as the original DVD. For that, TmpgEnc cannot deliver this, although you can play with the Q factor and the bitrate distribution over at CCE. TmpgEnc is still one of my favorites though.
