I'm not too familar w/ episode dvds, can I do them w/ dvdshrink alone?

[spruceland]

I wanted to backup some episode dvds I have. I've backed up dozens of regualar dvd movies w/ dvdshrink and dvd2one. Now I'm ready to do some episode dvds and am clueless. Can I do this with the new dvdshrink 2.2? I really would like to just use one program or wait for "the" program to come.

If I can use dvdshrink, I have an episode dvd that is 180 min long. Is it possible just to burn 3 out of the 4 episodes and then later take the 4th episode and burn it with 5,6, & 7 from the other dvd and so forth? How simple is it? As always, thanks in advance.

[papillon]

spruceland

I have done most of my full episodic dvd's with Dvd95Copy, without any failures, besides I feel their video quality is better than dvd2one.
Since Shrink v2.2 is free, give it a try and let us know how they come out. An episode dvd of 180 min is not very long, and should come out well. It's when you get the 4 hour dvd's, that's when you may get a "soft" video appearance. Episodic disks are from made for tv video anyway, so I alter my expectations accordingly.

[molman2003]

Yes you can do it with shrink, however all that will happen is that there will be no menu (unless the DVD is less than 4.3gb).
If you are extracting from various DVD's, use Derrow's guide for IFO and VOB edit to join multiple VOBs and create a new IFO.
You can then burn these to a blank DVD.

[69Mws]

I also tested episodic Titles with DVDShrink 2.2

I also own DVD95Copy. The main advantage of DVDShrink IMHO is, that it gives you more control over compression than DVD95Copy in case when the episodes are spread over several Titlesets instead of being contained all in one Titleset.

The compression setting "Fit to DVD-R" in DVD95Copy is only allowed for one titleset. So if the episodes are spread over several Titlesets, you have to guess which compression levels to use for the other Titlesets. IMHO what DVD95Copy really needs is a "WYSIWYG-View" (what you see is what you get) of the final size, regarding selected compression ratios, audiotracks, etc.

I used DVDShrink 2.2 on some episodic DVDs from Buffy (german R2) which all have ~3hrs playtime and I kept two languages (192 kbps each) and the result looked very well. I doubt that the result would have been that good with version 1.3. Seems that transoding-/compression-algorithms have been much improved :)

I also think that it depends much on how many audio-tracks you'll keep and which bitrate they have.

~3 hrs with 2x192 kbps audio is fine, but ~3hrs with 2x384 kbps (or even 448 kbps) like in Babylon5 (german R2) for example is more critical cause there the audio needs much more space, at least when you wanna keep two tracks.

Maybe I'll test that although I must say that in case of B5 I'd prefer the english audio-track alone (although I'm german, but the german syncro is terrible :) ) but I might give it a try, just to see how quality comes out with DVDShrink 2.2

Greetz
69Mws

[spruceland]

I did six feet under disc 1 with dvd shrink 2.2. Looks great. I did the full disk mode and then compressed the menu and extras and kept only the English sound. I really didn't care about the extras, so I put that in "still mode" compression and when I found that I still had a little room on the disc I used level 8 compression on the menu instead of the still. It was easier than I thought and the result is very good at level 7 at 35%. I'm going to try my Highlander series disc 1 now. Thanks


update: I guess I lucked out on six feet under. My highlnader and 24 series dvds cannot get lower than a 40% compression rate. I didn't even bother burning it on dvd. I wish a program would come out that would let you put take various episodes out and put them on dvd-r.