A beginners story -Hear that DVDShrink is this fantastic product, and free! Get it. -Realize that I need a burner program. Though Nero is ideal with DVDShrink, Sonic/Roxio is available, so buy that. -Realize that most movies are encrypted, so get DVDFab. Free shareware, they say! -Never use DVDShrink again, as all features are subset of DVDFab. -Still find that nice movies (the ones most wanting backup, duh!) need too much compression, particularly if extras desired. Eliminating foreign languages simply doesn't get it done. So buy DVDFab Platinum to use "split" and "customize." -Split doesn't work. It makes disks that are unplayable in standalone player. Decide to delete Gigs of files on my harddrive so I can make _TS files and manually individually make two respective .ISOs from \DISK1\ and \DISK2\. (Have learned that burning directly from _TS files always or nearly always makes coasters.) -Split is not customizable in terms of eliminating titles. Abandoning split and manually designing splits with Customize and selecting chapters. -Set DVDFab to "always use PathPlayer" hoping to see the "ignore annoyances like FBI warnings" - although checking that doesn't seem to do anything. -Still trying to squeeze, find that neither DVDShrink nor DVDFab (except in custom mode, theoretically) will eliminate titles. So must download VobBlanker. At least it's free. -Along this road, have had to mentally evaluate and decide against 208 other suggestions using other product combinations. I'm a somewhat advanced computer user but jeeeeeez! Cripes, this stuff is not for the thin of skin. I'm sitting here thinking over in my mind that I should have instead simply bought jewel-less backups of my entire collection on half.com. And I'm into 100+ hours of research and product trial and error and lots of coasters, and still need over half an hour per movie to make less-than-ideal 2-disk backups. It seems like all of this is just beating myself up while escaping the inevitable solution of writing to DL. I'm about to go to my 5th software product and I still don't have a way to make a 70+% size main plus extras on one disk, and find DVDFab "split" is useless, and "full disk" is useless because nothing I've yet seen fits on DVD-5. Right??
Well, I'm not trying to be completely rhetorical. Is media cost basically the obstacle? Do the above softwares, and all hardware handle DVD-9 transparently and reliably?
Imgburn best dl burning prog around. I presume that your burner is dl capable? Also use good dl +R media as Verbatim MI Japan or Ritek +R dl 2.4x Imgburn can booktype/bitset certain burners to dvd-rom for best compatibility for standalone dvd players ( only +R can be booktyped )
The TDK indiDVD box says 12X, +R, +RW,, -R, -RW, but doesn't mention DL. I should correct my top post in not noting that DVDShrink is potentially beneficial in that it allows title-by-title individually chosen compression levels, albeit frustrating that it usually only goes down to 40% when 0% or 5% would be useful for some non-main titles. (DVDFab apparently uses the same compression level on all included titles.) And I gather that if I only use DVDFab "Customize" then no reason to bother with VobBlanker, since unclicking titles achieves the aforementioned "0%."
i go the easy route anydvd running in background with dvdshrink main movie no extra shizz (sorts alot of size issues out) i have had a play with dvd rebuilder / CCE pretty good!
I'm with Rotary , your making this to hard lol other options use clonedvd 2 + anydvd and be done with it in mins. or use the software your using doing the movie only getting it on a dvd-5 SL why DL ? it cost about 1.80 a unit expensive huh? SL media about 24 cent a unit less expensive huh ? Seven dvd-5 SL DVDs cost about the same as one dvd-9 DL Most DVDs ( i would say 95%) will fit on a DVD-5 (SL) blank with little or no compression doing the movie only! why not go this route?
