Use DVD Shrink 3.0 Beta 5 ? It's FREE, can do almost everything you could wish in as few as 3 steps - It will rip your movies (gets rid of that ?pesky? copy write protection thingy ;-) in generally 2 to 3 minutes, it can be used for your smaller DVD-5?s and it also allows you to compress your larger DVD-9's to the necessary 4.36GB in order to insure a nice burn without encroaching onto the very edge of the disc. The finished product is sure to please with no significant loss of video or audio quality.
For those who like the backups ?Their way?, it also allows you to tailor your DVD?s however you wish. To keep in or remove audio streams menus, Director?s comments, extras and trailers all that is required is to click and drag a line (re-author), it couldn?t be easier. PLUS it provides you with a nice neat VIDEO_TS folder for you, perfect to have Nero, CloneDVD or RecordNow Max burn for you.
Nero 6.0 is excellent with a lot of extras you are sure to use in the near future or consider RecordNow Max ver.4.5 or CloneDVD, both are excellent alternative burner choices. Actually, I use CloneDVD a lot; I like to watch the sheep ;-).
HINT: I created a folder on my HD named "DVD Work" and before ripping my DVD?s I create another sub-folder with the name of the movie I'm backing up. (I.e. DVD Work\Starship Troopers.) When you click "Backup" in DVDShrink, a box will come up saying "Target Folder:? click "Browse" and trace your path back to "DVD Work\Starship Troopers" - when DVDShrink is finished, it will give you your VIDEO_TS folder already made for you in your DVD Work\Starship Troopers folder and you?re good to go. Now, , if you wish, you can burn it days down the road. At one point I had 23 movies sitting there, just waiting for my shipment of blank DVD media to arrive.
When you wish to burn, use the "File Browser" in Nero (don?t use Wizard) to trace your path back again to DVD Work\Starship Troopers, you don?t have to try to remember where your work is or if you need to do anymore work on it, it is completely finished, ready to go ? you are done and done ?
If your movie is really long, meaning that most of the 8 Gigs is from the movie, you might run into problems trying to compress it to fit onto one dvd, the movie quality might be bad if you use compression ratios above 35% or so. If after removing all extra material the movie still requires lots of compression, you might want to split the whole thing onto two dvdr:s, in which case you can leave all the menus and extras, no compression required either. For this you have to use DvdFab or IFOEdit.
