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Article Title: DVD Shrink - The quick way to backup your DVD collection

Article Author: Daryl Quenet
Article Category: Audio & Video
Times Read: 14471
Date: 2005-06-20 20:00:00
Pages: 1

The most common question I hear from people who have recently purchased a DVD Writer is how do I backup my DVDs to 4.5GB discs. Most commercial DVDs you purchase in the store are DVD9 dual layer discs which means they store up to 9 Gigabytes (some cheaper movies are distributed on single layer DVD5 discs). When you purchase DVD+R or DVD-R discs your actually purchasing a 4.5gb disc (DVD5) so naturally most movies can not be burned in the state in which you purchased them in. Recently DVD+R DL (Dual Layer) discs have come to market, but these things will set you back a pretty penny. The cheapest you'll usually see them around is $5/each on sale. I buy my DVD+R discs on a spindle for around $.50 Canadian each, so shrinking movies quickly becomes the economical way of backing up your movies.

Today I'll be writing about DVD Shrink, a freeware MPEG2 transcoder. Now when it comes to reducing the quality of any MPEG2 footage there are two different methods you can use. The first and quicker method is Transcoding, this method involves taking the entire film and applying mathematical formulas to it to shrink it by a given percentage. The second and higher quality, more time consuming method is Encoding. In encoding video compression algorithms are applied to the footage to convert it to this standard. Now personally I believe in transcoding if the reduction is less then 20%, and provided it's not an action movie or a movie with lots of movement. You'll find the biggest difference in the quality between encoded and transcoded movies will be noticed in extremely high action scenes (like bombs exploding).

Now DVD Shrink I must say is a very intuitive program, with lots of thought having gone into its design and feature set. You can either backup an entire DVD, or Re-author the DVD and transcode just the movie. Out of choice when I backup my movies I strip out the extras and just backup just the movie for maximum quality. This is where the current version of DVD Shrink currently lacks. If you want to burn just the movie & menu while stripping out the extras you are going to have to use an additional program (such as VOB Blanker). Now lets start the fun by opening DVD Shrink, and selecting Open Files. I'm now going to select a directory that contains a DVD file structure in it, and press okay.

Above is a picture of DVD Shrink in full movie mode. For each entry on the DVD you can select the following Video transcoding modes: No Compression, Automatic, Custom Ratio, Still Image, and Still Pictures. For the sample movie I have selected Father Of The Pride, which is a great series. In fact they really cut this series short, like so many other good series in the past. This movie is a great example because it has so many different title entries on one DVD. On this DVD the title entries represent episodes of the show, for some movies they can represent full and wide screen editions on one disc, possibly alternative endings, or alternative angles common used by Disney for multiple languages to have the credits in each language. On this particular disc I've left most of the settings on Automatic (with the exception of some extras that I changed into still pictures and stripped the sound out of), and I have also deselected all of the 2.0 audio tracks where there was also a 5.1 track present, and deselected all the subtitles. In Automatic mode the six (episodes) Main Movie Titles compression values were (each part is 20 minutes) 64.4%, 68.7%, 69.7%, 70.5%, 70.6%, and 71.8%.

Now the other alternative method (the one I would be more likely to do) would be to Re-author this disc and put several episodes on each discs in order (of the series) that are uncompressed without the menus. Essentially your making a DVD with multiple titles that goes from one title to the next in a row (use chapters to speed through them). Alternatively you can also built small menus easily that can point to each episode. This series is a 2 disc set and if you wanted it all uncompressed would be looking at 3 DVD5 (single layer) discs. The first method is really pushing the limits as to how much I like to transcode a movie, 30% is a quite the quality decrease coming from a transcoder.

So once you have selected your compression settings and the method, click on Backup! to continue onto the next step. Now a window will pop up with some advanced features. First off if you don't have DVD Decrypter installed I would recommend installing it now, it's extremely useful and freeware. DVD Shrink supports using both the Nero burning engine and DVD Decrypter (my preference) to burn the DVD5 images after it is encoded. Alternatively you can also set DVD Shrink to save them both in DVD format into a directory, or as just an ISO image without burning it.

Additional useful features are the new features under the Quality Settings tab. First off always make sure you perform a deep analysis when it is available (it is not available when no compression is required). Secondly is the "Compress video with high quality adaptive error compensation" this helps your video look smooth or sharper. I almost always use the default settings of Sharp, except for cartoons / animation when I'm using a low compression ratio I use smooth. Also I would always leave Region Free on, disable backup in low priority mode, and set the title of the movie. Now click on OK and your off to the races.

For encoding movies I also suggest having atleast 2 hard drives, when copying / dealing with large amounts of Data it's considerably faster to access & write it synchronously. That way you don't have to worry about the disc seeking out the data, between write cycles and the read cycles (you will see what I mean you you start encoding).

I've talked to a great host of people online that use DVD Shrink, and although some will debate that it is a sub par DVD copying method, it definitely has its advantages. When encoding instead of transcoding a movie it takes around twice as long per pass to process that movie. Generally the more passes when encoding the movie the higher the quality (to a point) the output will be. If you would like more information on encoding I would suggest checking out the Doom9.org forums. If your ready to try some transcoding download a copy of DVD Shrink & DVD Decrypter today!

HomePage - DVD Shrink

Unforunately due to copyright issues DVD Decrypter is no longer distributed from a Website. If your interested in using this program I'de suggest searching online for DVD Decrypter 3.5.4.0