Everybody and their mom knows that DVD's are the only movie format to buy or rent. With the prices so low on DVD writers so many people are uhhh... backing up their DVDs. It's rather surprising how much trouble some people are having doing this. For those kinds of people I have a few quick articles I'm putting together. This first one will be taking a DVD and putting it onto a DVD+/-R. The next one will be taking a DVD and converting them to my favorite codec Xvid. Both of these are really rather simple if you follow a few easy steps.
Disclaimer: The instructions here are only for backup purposes only. If you do not own the disc you are doing this to then you will be breaking the law. The disc I did this to is a part of my home collection.
DVD Shrink is by far the best tool out there for copying a full DVD onto your drive and also shrinking a dual layer disc so that it can fit on a single DVD+/-R. After you're done putting it on your hard drive burn the sucker using whatever your favorite DVD software is. BTW this will also make the disc region free if you leave the defaults alone! This'll be good for playing your imports on your stand alone DVD player.
Get this software here and lets get going. Obviously install it and open it
Click on the open disk |
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After that this screen will pop up where you select which disc you want to open. |
| You'll see it basically scans over the content of the entire drive for a couple minutes. Then you'll see a screen with what it'll take to fit the contents of your selected disc onto a DVD+/-R. In this case it'll only be able to fit 55.3% of the video onto a DVD+/-R. If you're an image quality freak you'll want to do whatever you can to get this number higher. In this case It's Buffy season 1 disc 1. One thing you could do in the case of TV shows is fit an episode or two per blank DVD. OR |
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Uncheck whatever things you don't plan on using like foreign audio tracks and subtitles. It only ends up being 61.2% in this case.
In the left bar clicking extras you can change the video to still pictures and uncheck the audio. This brings the video on the episodes up to 64.2% Nice and easy image quality boost for dumping the extras. |
After you've selected all of the items you want click on backup.You'll then see the box pictured on the right.
I would suggest to rip it directly to the image recorder which will make an ISO that you can then burn or play using something like daemon tools to mount a virtual DVD drive.
The ripping process can potentially take an hour sometimes more under some circumstances.
I've heard from many people that the Lite-on XJ-HD166 drive is the fastest at this kind of thing. I haven't confirmed this myself but it's $31 at newegg so it can't really hurt! Extracting digital content speeds vary greatly between manufacturers so make sure you avoid the off brands if you plan on doing alot of this kind of thing. |
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That'll be all you need to do. Open the image in your DVD burning app and burn. You now have a working region free DVD. Stay tuned for my Xvid encoding article if this isn't quite for you.
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If you don't have a DVD burner then you can use Daemon tools. After you install and start this program it will automatically mount a virtual drive.
--> Right click on the daemon tools icon (the red thing)
--> Put your mouse on Virtual CD/DVD
--> Put your mouse on Device 0
--> Click mount Image
--> Browse to where the image is
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Then Autoplay should kick in and your default DVD player will load. If you did everything right then your DVD should be playing! You now have a DVD playing from your hard drive and taking up only 4.36Gb of data and could also be burned in nero.
If you want any help or have any comments regarding this article please take it to this forum thread.
