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Same here...don't have an HDTV yet. Still waiting for the technological advances to stabilize a bit. Right now anything you buy is made near obsolete by the next year's models.

I'm sort of in between.  I have a Sony 27" CRT type TV with 1080i. The finest quality isn't required since it's not being blown up large.  If you have a decent source, DVD upconverted looks pretty good.  Also I have a WD set top box.  It can play Avi/Divx HD and .mkv .m2ts. It has it's problems but it's nice to see some stuff in native HD.

I think they phased out these "WEGA" HDTVs. I got this one for $520.. about the price of a conventional color TV.  I have relatives with a gigantic Sony HDTV that fills their living room but every time they come by and see some HD content on this thing they marvel at the quality.  So it's a good compromise of cost/quality.

Even if you have a set top box that plays .mkv you have to make some decisions about storage.  If a stack of Sata drives in a cabinet is an option that's cool.  My budget can't handle that. If you have a nice looking .mkv it will often convert to DVD9 which, played on an upconverting DVD player, can look very nearly like the source in quality.  The other option, to shrink the .mkv, requires 4 or 5 or 6 hour sessions with Handbrake.  If you have a super PC though, that may be a viable option.  I'm not sure how well Handbrake handles multi-core.  I've only actually done a few runs with it.  I got good results on one run that took about 4 hours.  When it starts telling me the job is going to take 7 or 8 or 9 hours, I abort.  I don't have the patience for it.

Once you start watching a TV with 16x9 mode you probably will want to get everything 16x9 anamorphic.  4x3 letterboxed doesn't seem so bad played on a conventional TV, until you start watching a 16x9 TV, then go back and look at some of the old DVDs you bought.  One drawback to doing HD => DVD is resizing down is slow.  What you end up doing is usually shaped by what equipment you have to watch the stuff on.  On some boards if I mention I don't mind burning subtitles into the video, it's like I spoke out against democracy or something!! Oh no!! You're ruining the video quality!!!  Like I have a 5 foot wide TV to watch it on like that guy!!

LOL, I'm also curious what Innuendo's DVD Rebuilder log files indicate on the total Rebuild Time.

I can only imagine what stunning times can be attained with his setup and DVD Rebuilder Pro.

Even if you have a set top box that plays .mkv you have to make some decisions about storage.  If a stack of Sata drives in a cabinet is an option that's cool.

Storage isn't a problem. I don't have tons, but my PC has 2 TB of storage in it & a NAS with two 1.5 TB drives in it. Never mind that that's all nearly full because I'm a packrat of epic proportions, though....

Quote from: sajman99 on April 17, 2010, 06:53 PM

LOL, I'm also curious what Innuendo's DVD Rebuilder log files indicate on the total Rebuild Time.

I always delete that out of habit. Next encode I do I'll try to remember to take screenshots & not delete the log.

Don't know about 8 instances of HCenc all open on the desktop, though. DVD-RB has always opened them minimized. Don't know off-hand if I can change that.

Click 'em all fast and hit Print Screen!!  Even better would be a video.  I'd like to watch the progress bar just go zzzzzzzzzzzzzzooooooooooommmmmmmmmmmm => Done!! Must be almost like just copying the file.

Quote from: MilesAhead on April 08, 2010, 02:01 AM

New HCenc beta

http://www.videohelp.com/tools/HC

HCenc 0.24 is no longer beta. Works great without any problems here. I'm sure I'll be moving to BD Rebuilder at some point, but this amazing encoder has been great for good 'ole standard DVD.

I just did a run with it last night.  I was a bit paranoid when it started to encode and changed my max of 9000 kbit to 9400 .. but I guess he knows what he's doing.  The output looked great. It's a shame FAVC has some quirks. I would like to find a reliable way to run HC Enc concurrently an instance per core.. even if it was just to do the video encode section of the job.  I'll have to investigate the params and see if it's easy to have each instance work on a different video section and piece it together.  The multi-threading uses only about 1/2 my CPU power so I'm thinking there's got to be room to run at least 2 instances.

HCenc 0.25 has been released. Evidently 0.24 would sometimes hang at the end of the encode. Guess I was lucky--never had the issue. I encoded several movies last week with 0.24 and all completed successfully with the typical great quality.

http://www.videohelp.com/tools/HC
http://hank315.nl/

I didn't have any hangs either. I'm envious though.  In DVD-Rebuilder thread on DOOM9 these dudes with 8 core processors are talking about DVDRB processing a 2 hour DVD in 18 minutes using it. I assume they mean using 2 pass best profile.

Yeah, that is wild.  I did a double-take when you wrote an hour, but I tend to forget most of the time I'm sizing down.  Really kills the fps when you're resizing to a smaller frame.

It's amazing what a difference a rich source makes though.  Often when I encode a DVD9 using HC I'll shrink it to DVD5 with DVDShrink to test burn an erasable disc. Just to make sure there's no stutter in the video or something else weird.  Usually even the erasable DVD5s look great!! A tad more gloss with the DVD9 after upscaling though. I'm thinking DVD9 blanks should start to get a lot cheaper as people get set top boxes.  I'd like to see them come down to < 50 cents a disc.