[showtaper]

Originally Posted by kidrocklive

when you use the dvd video option on this program and redo the dvd with a menu and junk, when it reauthors it does it re-encode the entire video? I heard somebody say that you could just join all the vob files nad then use sony dvd architect to make a menu and stuff but I can't seem to get that to accept the VOB file(s). I got a dvd in the mail but it has no menu and 5min chapter splits, so I wanted to redo the dvd but not re-encode the video if that's possible.

A couple of paragraphs follow from the Pegasys TMPGenc website. They are now pushing version 2.0 but I believe most of the features are true from version 1.6 on. I use it all the time as I get many DVD's in trade that were authored on a stand-alone burners. Just rip the disc to your drive and use the DVD video input option and you can trim the clips as you wish then add chapters and menus. Works great and is pretty fast!!

Here's several of the features explained:

2. Smart Rendering
DVD Author 2.0 supports frame level MPEG editing features. Frame level editing is the most precise method for MPEG editing because it operates with frame level precision. Until now, frame level editing has required complete re-encoding of output video which has resulted in degradation of output video quality as well as a slow DVD building process. DVD Author 2.0 provides a smart rendering feature that eliminates this problem. It automatically analyzes video clips and makes sure that only the smallest possible number of frames is re-encoded. In other words, the smart rendering feature dramatically improves the DVD building process in terms of speed while preserving the highest possible video output quality.

3. Transcoding capabilities with Intercom’s® Transcoding Engine
You may often experience that DVD-Videos projects become too large to fit onto writable DVD discs when you add more and more contents to them. DVD Author 2.0 contains a transcoding engine from Intercom that helps you solve this problem. Rather than completely re-encoding video contents, the transcoding engine dynamically and rapidly recompresses video data streams with a minimal reduction in quality so that they will fit exactly to the size of the writable DVD media (4.5GB/8.5GB).

Hope this helps! I think #3 is new, whenever I authored an oversize disc in the past, I just used DVD Shrink to get it down to the correct size. I'll have to compare the Intercom recompression to DVD Shrink..........