Abstract: The aim of this paper is to investigate an efficient strategy that allows one 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 this 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 that was 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.