DVD shrink

[ravenhawk]

has anyone used dvdshrink to copy dvd's? I was looking at dvd cloner II and read that it is basically a rip off of dvd shrink. Im a total newbie so plain english please. Ive just upgraded to a sony dvd burner and am looking for software to copy dvd's. Ive heard that along with shrink decrypter and anydvd work well. Opinions or suggestions???

[{I}{K}{E}]

there is a guide for DVD Shrink in the Guides and Tutorials section

[mnfesq]

DVD Shrink is a good app for beginners. But do not expect too much from it. If you hope to compress a 7 gig, 2 hr. 20 min. video down to 4.5 gigs, you may find some spots (particularly in action movies or pron) where you lose video quality. DVD Shrink works best when you can strip out the extras and end up with the main feature that is under 4.7 gigs -that way, you just re-author without any compression. The more you compress, the longer it takes and the worse quality you end up with. For higher compression, ease yourself into a program like dvd2dvd or dvdrebuilder using the CCE SP encoder. It's not that easy, so DVD Shrink is a great way to start out.

[Wolfmight]

Dvd Decrypter is good for ripping the disk onto your hardrive, thus allowing it to process better in shrinking software
Then use DVDShrink to shrink different parts of the movie. 55% quality is the lowest you can to be pretty safe. I normally shrink the whole dvd movie including the extras, while tossing out foreign audio tracks and subtitles. Manually set the Extras to 55% first to see how much quality your movies has. Then if it's lower than 55% on your movie, lower the menus to around 55%. If it's still lower than 55% on your movie, lower the extras to around 45-47% (better to have em than not at all sometimes). If your movie is just way to big and cannot gain at least a 55% quality with everything else as low as it can go, kill the extras. I do not recommend turning off the menus, since it's really part of the DVD experience. Normally they can easily be kept at 55%, since their the smallest part on the disk.
When using the quality compression, make sure you also have "Deep Analysis" and "Sharp (default)" set. I've tried the others and Sharp appears to be the best one.

Now if everything was done correctly and your movie is over 55% quality, it should look just like the original. You can only see compression if you are literally 2" in front of the TV. Trust me, the movie looks great at 55% quality with those added filters. The range between 55 and 100 in quality is not very different at all. When you hit the 40s, you start seeing some crap. Just remember, never below 55 unless it's the extras and it's required to fit things.

[RealitY]

Its one of the better one click type apps. As mentioned if you can keep it as a dvd5 with little to no compression then it works fine. I think at around 70% compression with it though you will start seeing breakdown so youll have to tset it out really and see how you like it. It is deffinatly an app worth checking out though...

[ravenhawk]

Thank you so much. that was the info I was looking for.

[yossisal]

I use DVD2One after decrypter. Very good results!