DVD Shrink is a freeware competitor to commercial compressed domain transcoding tools, such as DVD2One (read our guide for DVD2One from here), XPRESS (read our guide for XPRESS from here), CloneDVD (read our CloneDVD guide from here),
DVD95Copy and DVD Copy. It has actually more options than most of its
commercial counterparts, but it is slightly slower and more difficult
to use than most of its competitors -- but nevertheless, it is totally
free.
With this guide, we will make a backup of a DVD-9 disc (DVD-9
means a DVD that is bigger than 4.36GB and therefore doesn't fit on a
single DVD-/+R without removing something from the disc or re-encoding
the disc. To find out whether your movie is a DVD-9 or DVD-5, please
refer to our DVD layer information database.) to a single DVD-R (or DVD+R, DVD+RW or DVD-RW) disc, maintaining all the extras and menus with the disc.
Requirements
To make things easier, we will use DVD Shrink for everything. Process
the material from the HDD instead of DVD. We can no longer provide
ripping instructions however, for more information please see -->
http://www.afterdawn.com/guides/archive/afterdawn_guides_copyright_law.cfmAnyway, the only piece of software you need is to follow this guide is:
In addition to DVD Shrink, you obviously need to have
at least 11 to 18 gigabytes of free HDD space available, a
DVD-R, DVD+R, DVD-RW or DVD+RW drive and optionally DVD burning software, such as
Nero.
DVD Shrink is capable of directly accesssing the Nero burning engine,
so if you have Nero installed, you can burn directly from DVD Shrink.
That's what we'll be doing in this guide.
Lets begin...
The first thing to do is to click the
Open Disk
button located in the top-left corner of the main window. If you have
already ripped the DVD using appropriate software, and have the files
located on your hard disk drive, click on the
Open Files button instead, and locate the folder where the VOB files are located.
Having clicked it
(provided that you have more than one optical drives), you need to select the correct DVD drive where the disc you want to backup is located.
After
you've selected the disc, DVD Shrink will do a quick analysis on the
disc. This will make less than 30 seconds in most of the cases if you
have relatively modern hardware in use. After this is done, make sure
that the
Full Disk button is pressed down at the top of the main window.
The size of the DVD
After DVD Shrink has finished analyzing the disc, take a look at the
green bar at the top of the screen. If it looks like the one shown to
the right, i.e. a part of the bar is grey, and the size is less than
4,464 MB, you are processing a
DVD-5 disc, which fits directly on a single DVD±R disc.
If at any point a part of the bar turns red, it means that even after processing the
movie won't fit on a DVD±R(W) disc. This should not normally happen, if you follow this guide and don't go about adjusting compression settings manually.
At the lower left part of the screen you can see a preview window of
the selected title. You can use to view the title and listen to a
specific audio track. The preview window can be very helpful indeed
when determining what to lose and what to keep.
Choose what to keep
To the left of the screen you can see the structure of the DVD. You can
navigate it like any other tree structure in Windows, and adjust
settings for each section and title separately.
First click on the
Main Movie
and take a look at the percentage you can see to the left. It shows the
ratio of the compressed video versus the original video. You want to
keep the percentage as high as possible or in other words to keep the
compression as low as possible. The smaller the extra compression is
the less compression artifacts will appear in the backup copy.
The
only way to increase the percentage is leaving off unwanted features of
the movie. The most space-consuming features are the audio tracks and
the extras. Since we are backing up the whole movie, we won't be
leaving out extras. The only remaining option is to strip audio and
subtitle tracks.
In this case we want to leave out everything
but the English AC3 5.1 audio track, and the subtitles. Dropping the
English DTS and commentary track, and the Finnish audio track saves
about one gigabyte (1,000 MB) of space to be used for the video. That
increases the compression percentage from 43% to 63% and significantly
increases the video quality.
Adjusting the extras
Repeat the same process for the extras by clicking the
+ sign next to the
Extras
item in the DVD structure tree. If some of the extras are taking up
considerable amounts of space (eg. over 1,000 MB), you should consider
manually adjusting the compression ratio to free up more space for the
main movie.
To do this select
Custom Ratio from the dropdown in the
Video Compression Settings
to the left. Adjust the slider to increase the compression -- the
smaller the percentage, the higher the compression, and hence the
smaller the space required.
In this case the extras take up only 100 MB of the disc, so the automatic compression will do just fine.
Backup!
After you've gone through all the items and are satisfied with the compression percentage, click on the
Backup button to start the backup process.
A
Backup DVD dialog window opens up allowing you to set various options before burning. First select the target drive for burning, choose
Image Recorder to create an ISO image to be burned at a later time or choose
Hard Disk Folder to just create the
VIDEO_TS folder content suitable for burning.
Under the
DVD Region
tab you can adjust region settings for the backup. By default DVD
Shrink makes the backup region free, so usually there's no need to
adjust the selections.
Under
Backup Options you can set
the priority for the backup to be low, so that processing the DVD will
not consume more resources than is absolutely necessary. That way you
can continue working with your computer while DVD Shrink processes in
the background. You can also set DVD Shrink to shut down your computer
after backup, if you want to leave it processing for the night.
The volume label and the burn speed (or image target) are defined under the
Burn Settings tab. If you are burning on DVD+R/RW media, you can tick the
Burn at least 30mm box for higher compatibility.
Encoding
Once you are satisfied with the settings, click
OK to start the backup process. This will, again, take quite a while, and the speed depends on your CPU and DVD-speed.
If you chose to burn the DVD immediately, DVD Shrink will begin burning
automatically after the encoding is done. If not, then your ISO image
or prepared VIDEO_TS folder is available for burning after the encoding
process. For instructions on how to make a DVD-Video disc from a
VIDEO_TS folder, please read the
burning DVD with Nero guide.
For questions, comments, suggestions and more information, please visit our
discussion forums and post your comments there.
We'd like to thank our user
Oriphus for providing the draft and the idea for the guide -- thanks mate!
