  The aim of this paper is to investigate an efficient strategy that allows to
obtain pi-pi phase shifts and rho meson properties from QCD lattice data with
high precision. For this purpose we evaluate the levels of the pi-pi system in
the rho channel in finite volume using chiral unitary theory. We investigate
the dependence on the pi mass and compare with other approaches which use QCD
lattice calculations and effective theories. We also illustrate the errors
induced by using the conventional Luscher approach instead of a more accurate
one recently developed that takes into account exactly the relativistic two
meson propagators. Finally we make use of this latter approach to solve the
inverse problem, getting pi-pi phase shifts from "synthetic" lattice data,
providing an optimal strategy and showing which accuracy is needed in these
data to obtain the $\rho$ properties with a desired accuracy.
