VSO Software Forum

I am confused on how to get the best quality with this program, as it seems they have changed how a lot of things work, in comparison to convertxtoDVD. Unless they made major changes related to this in xtoDVD 5. only have version 4.

From my tests with convertxtoHD, it looks like using automatic does not give the same results solely due to it being a short project. In other words, it seems to me that a short project on the upper end barely before it switches to medium is not using as high bitrates as if you are on the low end of short project.

For instance when I burned 1 title and then looked at details of the file, it listed bitrate as higher than the same title was when converted in with a group of other titles. Even though both times it was set to short project.

The only differences in settings were that I had disc size set to custom 100GB when I did omly the one title and also it was set to AVCHD. When I did a project with MULTIPLE titles, I did BD-50 and Blu-ray. Otherwise the other settings were the same, I believe. It's possible I used a different resizer. If I did one was Lanczos and one was Linear.

I still can't really decide if I should use Lanczos or Linear and whether to use 480, 720, or 1080 when the source material is 480. A lot of my tv shows, for instance, are pretty bad quality. SOme even were vhs transfers.

I am using an OPPO 103D, which is supposedly known for good upconversion itself. But when I did tests with titles burned in different resolutions I would go back and forth on whether there was a big difference or not.

I don't know what to think. I just tested again and indeed it did the same thing. If I do lesser time on a project, the same titles have bigger converted files, meaning it's converting at a higher bitrate even though both are short project. So it's different than convertxtoDVD, but as far as I know there ahs been no documentation explaining that it's different.

Also, it seems to base everything on minutes and nothing on source material. Whether high bit rate or low bitrate source material, it will burn the same size ISO file given the project is of equal length. So this has me worried that even when selecting automatic it's not doing the same type of encoding that it would do in convertxtoDVD and I remember people said the way convertxtoDVD did a project with automatic was a lot better than if you forced it into a profile. SInce convertxtoHD seems to not take anything into account other than time and it burns the same size file on different types of content, that sounds to me like it's trying to squeeze something onto a disc like picking a profile could do in convertxtoDVD.

So now I have no clue what to do and I can't just keep re-burning to test. It's time-intensive. Also yet another odd fact is before it burned the ISO it said I needed x amount of free space, yet the ISO file it burned was 10 gb bigger than the amount of space it said, unless I totally misread it somehow!

These programs are amazing, but it's sure tougher than ever to figure out how much you can fit on a disc and keep it at the highest bitrate. Clearly using automatic short project isn't enough to do that.

For those who want to know what I have learned from testing:

Yes, very short project gives better bitrates in this program than short project does. Or worded in a better way, for lengths over x it lowers the bitrates while still calling it short project (even very short project doesn't always mean it's at its best possible bitrate).

When testing various things, I got a title to be at the cap, because it ended up the same size under multiple configurations.

The rule of thumb, so far, seems to be go until it barely gets to medium, then knock 1/3 of your project length out and it will then be at a point where it will end up with the highest bitrates. Although, just to be safe, I am setting my project size in settings to more than double of the real size of the disc, just to be sure nothing triggers it to believe that it's running low on space.

When I did a big length project with target size more than double the real disc size, the resulting files were being the same size as if I did ONE title with the real target size, so that tells me that putting the target size more than double will fool it into giving the best result.

Of course it's more risky this way because you have to guess on the length you could safely fit on a legit disc size. That is what I did in convertxtoDVD, though. it's just a pain if you accidentally make the result too big and have to start over.

I wish there was a way to take PART of past conversions and add them to a new project without it having to encode again. If VSO wants suggestions, that is a suggestion from me. That way if you do accidentally end up with a file too big, you could add some of the titles into a new project without the time wasted re-converting. I'm sure you can add the previous conversion in, so basically all there would have to be is a trigger to know that it had already been converted in the program before and doesn't need to be altered. Technically, you could probably simply add the files straight into the folder, but then it would mess up the menu.