[MathiasDK]

Hello,

I have some DVDs that I would like to make a backup of. I used to use "Handbrake", but it could only copy the movie from the DVD and not the extra material, subtitles ect.

Does anyone know if there is a program (or two) which can help me make backups of my DVDs on 800 MB CDs and still keep all the extra DVD stuff?

[mitchell_pgh]

It's not possible - Mac or PC

[rjenkinson]

if you want backups of your DVDs, uh... use DVDs.

-r.

[MathiasDK]

Are you sure?

The problem is that I want to watch the movies on my iBook without DVD-drive!

[mishap]

Originally posted by MathiasDK:
Are you sure?

The problem is that I want to watch the movies on my iBook without DVD-drive!

Rip the dvd and copy the 4-8 gigs of data to your iBook--

watch, delete, and repeat

[ccrider]

you can use dvdbackup to decrypt it, then use dvd2one to bring the file size down. It allows you to copy only the movie, or the whole disc. It's mainly used to allow dvds over 4gb to fit on one dvd-r (general use) but it will work for your situation too.

dvdbackup is free, dvd2one is not. Just as long as you get the unencrypted files on your laptop, you can use dvd player to open the video_ts folder.

[mitchell_pgh]

All good suggestions. Unfortunately, you aren't going to get 5-7GB of data down to 800 MB with all the extras.

You can degrade it to a VCD, but you are going to lose quality and the nice menus.

[starman]

Take better care of your DVDs.

[Fothb]

Originally posted by ccrider:
you can use dvdbackup to decrypt it, then use dvd2one to bring the file size down. It allows you to copy only the movie, or the whole disc. It's mainly used to allow dvds over 4gb to fit on one dvd-r (general use) but it will work for your situation too.

dvdbackup is free, dvd2one is not. Just as long as you get the unencrypted files on your laptop, you can use dvd player to open the video_ts folder.

This is the solution I was about to recommend. You would give DVD2OneX a target output size of 800MB. If DVD2OneX seems too expensive, you can go with a cheaper alternative such as FFMpegX.

This thread has made me curious. What would happen if you burned a CD in UDF format with a perfect AUDIO_TS/VIDEO_TS folder layout and put it in a home DVD player? Would it just look for the VIDEO_TS folder and start playing successfully? Is there anything a home DVD player uses to distinguish between DVDs and CDs except for UDF and the presence of a VIDEO_TS folder?

[Uncle Skeleton]

First things first...You can fit a (average length) movie into 800 MB with all the extras, including interactive menus (you must use the QT mov format for this), though you have to scale down from 720x to about 640x. First take a look at the tutorials:
http://tutorial.applesolutions.com
http://home.comcast.net/~appleguru/dvdrip.html
After ripping the feature you can add extras with Livestage Pro ($400) or the app I write (free). (I actually did my first interactive movie with GoLive 4, but that was really the wrong way to do it and one of the rollover buttons ended up crashing QuickTime instead of changing images ). You usually can't rip the extras from 0SEx for some reason, but you can with YADE, or find them yourself from a decrypted disc image, which any DVD decryption program can produce.

Moving on, CDs and DVDs use a different color laser, so depending on the DVD player it's equally likely that it will or won't read content on one kind of disc that was intended to be used on the other kind. Also, since DVDs are so much higher bitrate, it was once calculated (not by me) that reading DVD content off a CD at 1x speed from the inner half of the CD would necessitate spinning the disc faster than the speed of sound. Now I haven't double-checked the figures, and I know certain DVD players claim to read such discs (they're called CVD or something I think); maybe they use clever buffering tricks to get around this limitation.

Finally, DVD2One would never be able to hit such a low target, that's just wrong. The whole idea of DVD2One is that it removes data from the bitstream without re-encoding. now think, if most DVD rips use MPEG-4 and scale down to 640x272 and can still barely fit on 700 MB, how do you think DVD2One is going to do it without scaling and still using MPEG-2?

edit: Oh yeah, I don't know how on-topic this is, but beware of 800 MB CDs. They don't obey the spec and they have the potential to damage the drive when being read. If you were planning on overburning, you run a high risk of data corruption since you're bypassing the normal CD-R error correction, but at least you won't risk damaging your hardware.

[ccrider]

I should have been clearer in my response that dvd2one works well to pull the size of the dvd files down to fit on a standard dvd but it's not a good idea to go any further. It doesn't recompress the movie, just pulls out redundant data (b-frames and other things).

The main thing dvd2one is for is:

a) fitting a double density or double sided disc on one 4 GB dvd-r
b) joining multiple titles (i.e. simpsons episodes or 2 sided discs) on one disc

Handbrake is great to archive just movies or futurama episodes to your hard drive. The quality is great (if you use 2-pass encoding) and the speed is incredible. It also has a great cropping feature. It's also very helpful to pull things from dvds if you need them to use in spot and the client can't seem to find the beta tapes.