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Yeah, I have a really old DVD player (Toshiba 2006, from 1998). The only format it works with is DVD+R. Have copied about a dozen movies to DVD+R so far and played successfully.
Used DVD Decrypter to copy full DVD-9 to hard drive, then DVD Shrink 1.03 to compress it. If movie is short enough, there is usually room left also add most "extras" that DVD's usually have these days. DVD Shink is nice because you can fool around with compression levels and removing unneeded stuff (like logos, foreign language track, etc). Plus, you can shrink the main movie only slightly (level 1 or level 2) to keep quality high, and shrink the extra stuff more (like level 3 or 4) to squeeze as much as possible onto the disk. Only problem is the DVD menu won't work, so I just don't include that at all. Put movie in player, it starts playing the movie. Actually, my wife likes that better! When movie is done, the extra videos like "making of ..." just start playing, one after the other, kinda like hitting "play all" from the menu (if that existed).
Once in a while, with a long movie, if you want to keep the quality high, you have to split it to two DVD's. This is no problem with DVD Shrink because you can crop the videos. So, find a good spot in video to split (like a scene fade or black frame) and crop to put first part on disk 1 and second on disk 2. In this case, you generally don't need to compress the movie at all since your two DVD-5's should hold all of the contents of the DVD-9 source.
DVD Shrink level 1 compression is indistinguishable from the source, and level 2 is nearly so. Level 3 and 4 will show some artifacts so only use that if you really don't care about that sort of thing. Beyond level 4 is for archiving where you want to keep the sound but the video can be really crappy. Some people use these levels for the "extra"s just to get everything onto one DVD-5 (+R or -R), but I think if the quality is really bad, you probably won't watch it anyway, so why bother unless you just want to keep the audio.
How's that for a short answer!
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