I wanted to have a "movie" only version backup of The Forgotten, a DVD-9 - the actual movie will easily fit on a single layer blank DVD with no additional compression. The Forgotten has 2 versions of the movie - the theatrical version and an extended version with an alternate ending. These are co-joined titles on the DVD, which means they show up as Title 1 and Title 2, but are 99% physically the same on the DVD-9. Only difference is Title 2 has an additional chapter after the credits with the alternate ending. So I used Decrypter 3.5.2 to rip to an ISO file. No problems there - Decrypter does its job. Problem is in using Shrink or Nero Recode2 (Shrink with bells and whistles) to re-author just the actual movie. Trying to encode either Title 1 or Title 2 by itself caused both Shrink and Recode2 to bomb out with "insufficient memory" errors - apparently some memory buffer overflows. Trying to burn encode both Titles defeats the purpose since Shrink/Recode2 both see 7+ GBs and want to apply compression. So to fit just the movie without additional compression on one disk, I tried a different approach. I used the compression option on the "Extras" and made them a still image. Now Shrink only sees about 4.3 GBs when I do a Whole Disk Backup, and also gives me both versions of the movie. Of course I have to sit through all those inane warning and disclaimer screens, and the select the movie from a menu - but at least I haven't re-compressed the actual movie any, and it does work.
This is getting weird. I spent a couple of hours this morning getting The Forgotten backed up. I finally did just what you had trouble doing: I used dvd shrink, reauthored to copy just "Title 1" (I'm thinking that is the original version). No problems encoding or burning. Odd how this movie is giving such varied problems. OTOH, I may try what you did just so I can have both versions on a single dvd. I think they use the same VOB's up until the last one, so there shouldn't really be that much compression involved in having them both. Ya know, Follywood just invites people to hack and crack these protection schemes. I own the dvd, and would normally have not bothered to try to copy it, if it weren't for the challenge!
Brazilla, Good point about the "challenge" of backing up DVDs. I'm positive I would have no problem at all using Decrypter and Shrink to backup The Forgotten in the whole disk mode... However, I only wanted the actual movie, without even the chapter selection menu, so this became my challenge. Usually I just do a movie-only backup, and if there are any extras worth keeping, I'll put them on a second disk. A U.S. postage stamp costs more than a blank DVD now-a-days, so there's no incentive to cram everything on one disk, and a lot of times the extras aren't worth even seeing once.
