Decent quality DVD vision. Is it Possible?

Quality has everything to do with:

1. Top End Source material
2. Top End Encoder
3. Experience

Since 98% of people on these forums do not use or have any of these variables, there's no way to achieve the same quality has Hollywood. Most films are shot film and transferred or shot as 2k or 4k images.

High end encoders can cost as much as a small home. Backed by someone whos paid well knowing how its used and you have a combination which cant be matched by prosumer tools like Compressor.

Down converted in the most important step. since DVD is 720i it will need to be correctly down converted from 1080 first. Some method are better than other so its important to know the technical details of what is happening. Here's the workflow Ive always used:

http://www.precomposed.com/blog/2009/07/hd-to-sd-dvd-best-methods/

http://bellunevideo.com/tutorials/hd2sdTutorial/hd2sd.html

http://www.lafcpug.org/Tutorials/basic_hdvideo_to_dvd.html

Its alot to absorb at first :)

Bob, what are you talking about? DVD can't sustain more than 9.8 Mbps all streams combined and that on a replicated discs. The guy would do himself a huge favour if he buys CinemaCraft Encoder MP plugin for Compressor for less than $1K (American). The presets are to kill for, and it's the same engine as Hollywood's beloved CinemaCraft boxes.

Don't start on Adobe Encore with me, it can't do 100 passes on video, unlike CinemaCraft, its a buggy toy, compared to Compressor/DVDSP

Alex Asp/Solaris Digital Ltd.
Subtitle utilities HERE
Anti-aliasing for Highlights and Subtitles:HERE

No offense but it would be somewhat easy to pick out a stream done on Media Encoder or Compressor vs Cinema Craft with an experience compressionist.

I use FCP 7's Print to Video, outputting 1080 to be downscaled with a Matrox MXO2 LE and record straight to DVD with a settop box. If I need to work with the SD video more (e.g. DVD Studio Pro) I'll record SD to my Ki-Pro instead (which also does just as good or better downscale itself) and bring the SD file to compressor.

I too have never been able to get acceptable results with software... Until I tried it in FCPX! By bringing the finished HD edit into an SD Project (aka sequence) and then exporting. I was pleasantly surprised with the results after using compressor's DVD preset and burning. If the HD project in FCPX has a lot of effects/color correction etc. it will take forever to export an SD version. So I'll export HD current settings first, then bring the "baked" clip back in to an SD project to be exported. Not as good as the KiPro, and of course the result is not without artifacts but decent for what it is.

Either way, its not going to be a hollywood quality DVD, but quite honestly I don't even want my DVD's to look any better! As far as I'm concerned DVD needs to die a quick death, it's quality is too comparitely low to today's standards. Its such a shame to shoot beauliful 1920x1080 and deliver crappy SD. Blu-ray or file based delivery is where its at. On many projects I'll give the customer a free Blu-ray along with their DVD just so they'll have it in the future (I'm stunned by the quality of HD video compressed for iPnone even playback to tv via HDMI is good). DVD can't even maintain the quality of video shot on my friggin' cell phone (iPhone 4s)... Dun Dun Dun another format bites the dust.

I know, and top quality DVDs look great and are good enough for most consumers. It's just my opinion that they need to be done away with, not that I am predicting their imminent demise.

The degradation to m2v is what hurts the quality of even the best resolution video the most.
As Alex said, a quality encoder in expert hands will hurt the least, there's no way out of this, and there is no better encoder than CinemaCraft.

Cheers
Alexander