A friend of mine is selling me his entire collection of all the DVDs for the show 24 (including the recently released Season 4) and I want to know what kind of media they use in case I feel the need to back it all up (and I expect I will since its such a massive collection). I'm guessing they're all on single-layer DVDs but if they're on DLs, please tell me.
You most certainly could back that up if you owned it. Most programs, or combination of programs listed on this site would allow you to do that. If you are unsure of how to do it read the guides here at Ad.
No, its the size of the media. Unless you can compress 8-some odd GB of data into 4 GB of space, I'd have to buy a whole bunch of DL DVDs and they don't come cheap ($90 for 25 discs?).
You can make it fit. Check out these guides. They are extremely well written and easy to understand. http://home.comcast.net/~bbmayo/guides.htm
Read the guides for DVDFab Decrypter and DVD Shrink. You will need both of these programs as some of the 24 disks have some protection Shrink cannot get through. Use DVDFab Decrypter to rip these to your HDD and then use DVD Shrink to compress them to fit. You will then need a program to burn with such as Nero or free DVD Decrypter. You can get the software at the bbmayo site along with the guides http://home.comcast.net/~bbmayo/index.html
Wouldn't DVD Decrypter in itself work fine for ripping (sorry for asking so much but I've never tried this compression thing before, I'm used to just burning raw)?
DVD Decrypter still works for most disks, however it does have problems with newer protection. If you can rip all of your disks with no troubles with Decrypter that is great. However, if you run into any problems with I/O errors in Decrypter you may want to think about DVDFab Decrypter because it is updated, where DVD Decrypter is not, and DVDFab can do all the newer protected movies.
I'm an avid fan of 24 (did ya see the opener last night?!?!). Anyway, I have all the seasons backed up on DVD5's, even though they are pretty hefty originals. I'm real anal when it comes to quality but if you remove the unnecessary (for me, at least), languages and subtitle tracks, you can retain everything else on the disc and still have a more than adequate quality image. I've loaned out all my copies to the few friends that haven't gotten hooked (to catch up to this season) and none of them noticed any quality loss. With Shrink, you can get a 55-60% rate--which I think is fine.
