great guides but......

[shamoun]

I have had a good amount of experience with encoding movies before for backing up, i used to backup all my dvds to xvid and divx/ogm, but now that I have my dvd burner i began making backups of everything. I bought evangelion collections 1 and 2, collection 2 was a dvd-5 and i had no problems, but collection 1 was a dvd-9. I need to reencode the data but I can't afford scenario and dvd maestro doesn't seem to be available anywhere. Are there any guides that will show me how to do this with cce and freeware tools?

[Doom9]

I'm afraid there's no freeware tool that can even get close to the likes of Scenarist or Maestro. There isn't even one single decent freeware DVD authoring application. considering that you have to pay something like $50k, that's not surprising. If you only want the episodes without extra, you could try dvd authoring in ifoedit, but it's really a movie only thing (and it doesn't always work).
If you want to do a full backup, try one of the 1-click tools... the freeware DVD Shrink is one of the best tools in that area (but of course none of those tools can keep up with CCE).