Hi all, I've been reading quite a few of the threads here. I just bought my fist DVD burner and am in the market for software to help me back up my DVD's which I have purchased. A friend uses DVD Shrink along with Nero, I think, and has had success up until one of his newest movies "The Grudge" was being backed up for protection. Now I see that DVD Shrink's latest version update was in 2003 and there won't be a new update since the creater has moved on to work for Nero. It seems to me with the newest chips and encryption techniques being put into DVD's these days, wouldn't it make sense for me NOT to be using DVD Shrink? What do you guys think I should be using? DVD Decrypter seems to be a popular choice - I am interested in your opinions, many thanx.
With newer movies it is probably advisable to use DVD Decrypter for the iniital rip. You then use DVD Shrink to compress the rip to the appropiate size for DVD5 media. Despite assertions to the contrary - DVD Shrink is not dead - it will still handle over 95% of DVD's. With newer DVD's it is still extremely useful for compression purposes. Decrypter and Shrink are an ideal combination - it is just that sometimes you may need to rip with Decrypter prior to running it through Shrink. For info - did the Grudge today using DVD Shrink only in reauthor mode - did not need to use Decrypter.
... great - thanx. I'll tell that to my friend as well. That seems to be the favorite two combos that I have seen from people. Also, is it pretty much essential that I have about 10 GB freed-up on my HD to burn as well?
I'd consider that a minimum. See if you can't get a bit more room. Some DVD-9s are 8.5 GB and if you get Nero as well that is going to be cutting it damn close. One way to find out though is to try it.
If you are ripping to your hard drive, it is strongly recommended that you have at least 10GB free. Some movies can be up to 7 to 8 GB's and you also need free space for temp files and the MS operating system. To successfully fragment your drives, you normally need approx 15% of you hard drive capacity free.
Why not have several options to rip and burn? My main pc,i use dvd shrink and nero.I still have dvd decrypter on there just to mess around and for problematic encryptions and damaged discs. My single drive backup pc,I tend to use dvd decrypter more often/and compress with dvd shrink. Even though dvd shrink hasn't been updated for a long time,it still does the job for me. [bold] "The Grudge" [/bold] A very handy program called anydvd helped me to rip this movie with dvd shrink.Shrink would not let me rip this one until I turned anydvd on. This background ripper is a nice program. There is also something about the encryption on that movie that I had to edit out some of the beginning crap-to be able to view that backup. Very strange encryption,and many other members posted that exact same problem on the beginning of the movie -burning main movie only.
