DVD (Movie) Backup
I have youngin’s in the house who like to play with toys and gadgets. (I wonder where they get that from.) We’re on our second copy of the first Harry Potter DVD as a result of this “inquisitiveness.” This made me interested in DVD backups. The big problem here is DVD burners can create single layer (DVD-5) disks, which hold 4.7 GB, but many commercial disks are burned on dual-layer (DVD-9) media which hold twice a much. So the problem is how to squeeze all the extra bits on a DVD-5 disk? Here are some links to stuff I tried unsuccessfully:
Transcode
dvdbackup
DVD Transcoding Guide
StreamDVD
dvd::rip (apt-get install perl-Video-DVDRip; dvdrip)
Automatically transcoding DVD-9 to DVD-5 or how to backup a dual layer movie DVD.
To be fair, dvdbackup worked just fine–I just couldn’t get the rest of the way there in Linux. I was still able to use the files dvdbackup ripped. What I finally ended up using to shrink the files is a Windows program (gasp!) called DVD Shrink. I backed up the movie using dvdbackup, copied it to a fat32 partition, booted W2K and ran DVD Shrink on it. This created a new DVD directory layout (AUDIO_TS/… and VIDEO_TS/…). Then I booted back into Linux and created the ISO and burned the disk
mkisofs -dvd-video -udf -o /mnt/edit/shrunken.iso /mnt/dosedit/dvd-shrunken/.
growisofs -dvd-compat -Z /dev/dvd=shrunken.iso
The disk played fine on the computer but was refused by both the standalone players in the house and my Thinkpad’s (1999 vintage i1472) DVD player. Once I realized that the DVD files were all in lower case (thank you, Windows), I upper-cased them, rebuilt the ISO and burned another disk which worked fine. I now am the proud owner of my first DVD+R coaster!