What do you use to copy DVDs?

motithejrt

Limp Gawd
Joined
Oct 12, 2004
Messages
203
For, ahem, backup purposes only, what do you use to copy DVD's?

I use a combination of DVD Decrypter to rip to my HDD and then use Elby CloneDVD to encode and burn automatically.

It works great for me. With my lite-on ROM, I can rip with Decrypter, usually up to 8x-10x, which takes about 10 minutes or so. Encoding with CloneDVD takes around 20-25 minutes per DVD. In sum, it takes about 30-35 minutes for a commercial DVD.

I just wanted to know what others are using and if there is some other way to reduce time to copy.
 
I use DVD shrink to rip to disk. It is free. Then RecordMax now to burn. If the original is small and need no compression I can rip 2 DVDs at a time to disk.

I never found a DVD I could not rip unless it is all scratched to bell.
 
BTW, I know about DVD Shrink but I don't think it lets you preserve menus without a lot of extra work. I like the menus but not all the director comments and crap. CloneDVD2 allows you to remove features you don't want and yet preserve menus and then reduce the size to fit on a single layer dvd.

AnyDVD is great... but alas, I like to rip like 2-3 discs first, and then burn them when I get around to it.
 
DVD Shrink Keeps the Menus without any problems. It's actually harder to get rid of the menus.
 
I know it keeps the menus if you want it to, but if you wanted to increase the quality of the main movie but removing other content such as trailers, deleted scenes, and other special features, you would have to re-author the disk and that is when menus are not preserved unless you get complicated and edit menu files, etc.

At least that is what my experience has been. I actually burned my first few DVDs with dvd shrink until I realized I wanted the menus. That is when I switched. Unless of course, there is a new version out that I don't know about.

It's not a bad program, it is far from it, I just like my menus ;)
 
I use DVD Decrypter to rip, DVD2One to shrink, and Nero to burn. This has been a tried and true method for me for the last year and a half. I have used Shrink, and really like the program, but find that DVD2One is faster. I haven't used the new features of the new Shrink to test out quality. It seems like it just takes waaaaaay to long. DVD2One yeilds fantastic quality even when converting an 8.2GB TV Season disc to 4.7GB.
 
DVD shrink lets you take out certain items without destroying the menus. It's just that if you take out a trailer that's at the front of the movie you'll get a blank spot the length of that trailer.
 
Ok, look, DVD Shrink WILL let you take out some features (such as things in the beginning of the movie) but WILL NOT let you take out the special features such as interviews, deleted scenes / bloopers, etc. without destroying the menus. If you want JUST THE MOVIE and nothing else, DVD Shrink works awesome.

Now, say you have a disc that you want to keep the main movie of and preserve the menus (for scene selection), Clone DVD 2 WILL allow you to remove certain parts of the movie no matter where they are AND preserve menus.

For example, lets take Silence of the Lambs... it has the movie, interviews, trailers / tv spots, production photos, and a whole bunch of other shit I don't really care to have. All I want to keep is the movie and lets say the trailers / tv spots.

----

DVD Shrink way:

You have to re-author the disc and select the movie and the trialers / tv spots. It works fine, BUT, no menus will be preserved. It will then compress to fit on a blank 4.7gb disc if needed.

Now, when you play the DVD, the movie will start right away, no top menu, nothing. The trailers / tv sports will play depending on what order you put them in during the re-authoring. So if you put them first, you would either have to watch them all first or skip through them.

CloneDVD2 way:

A selection screen comes up where you can check off what you want, here the move and the trailers / tv spots. There is also a check box to preserve menus. It will then compress to fit on a blank 4.7gb disc if needed.

Now, when you play the DVD, it will typically come to the top menu (although some discs just start the movie). Either way, you have full access to the menus. So if you wanted to go through the thumbnails of the scenes, you could. Also, the trailers / tv spots are available in the menus.

ALL aspects of the menus are preserved. So if you did not want the, lets say, deleted scenes, the menu forth them will STILL appear its just if you try to select it, the screen will go blank while your player looks for that chapter and then will come back to the menu selection screen in brief few seconds with no effect.

----

The reason I like my menus is imagine this situation. You feel like watching some violence so you want to watch the lobby scene from the first Matrix. It's way in there, like chapter 20 or something. With a DVD Shrink DVD, you would have to skip through all the chapters to get to 20 (or whatever). With a CloneDVD2 disc, you just use the scene selection menu. Voila.

For all of you who like the WHOLE disc, features and all, DVD Shrink works great. I for on, like to have the movie and as high as quality as possible and fit it on one disc. If you keep all the crap, that is less room for high quality movie. Granted DVD Shrink lets you keep the movie at high quality, but again, NO MENUS.

Just my take. Let me know if I'm wrong.
 
The quick and dirty way to fix the problem of keeping menus in dvd shrink and taking out extra features but leaving some in is thus:

Find out the title, if the deleted scenes are title 3 and the trailers are 4, and you want to keep the deleted scenes but not the trailers... go to the dvd shrink menu, expand "extras" and then click on title 4. Under the compression ratio setting, change it from automatic or custom to "still pictures". It'll still leave the trailers in, but it'll compress it to basically 1% because there'll be no actual video, just still photos every 1/2 sec or 1 sec or something like that.

The main reason I do this is for dvds that have both widescreen and full screen on the same dvd. I want to keep my menus and special features but do away with the full screen version. If I compress it to still pictures, it remains on the disc but goes from ~1.5-2GB (depending on the dvd) to ~150MB (I think). Then, the compression on your widescreen version jumps to almost double what it was. It's a quick and easy method to keep menus and still "delete" some content without reauthoring.

That said... I'm going to be trying out dvdclone apparently because that might be easier.
 
DVD Decrypter
DVD Shrink
Nero to burn

I use Shrink to get everything off the dvd 'cept the movie.....everything else goes in the trash. I like to be able to stick the movie in and have it play automatically in 5.1 without having to see any menues, so that is all that I leave on the burned disc.
 
Back
Top