A couple questions - ripping / burn related

[earthslash]

Hello everyone,

I'm new to the forum and DVD ripping/burning in general, purchasing a DVD burner about a month ago and not using it much until the past couple weeks. I never knew it was possible to rip from a dvd-rom drive to a computer hard drive until I read the guides... I felt a bit dumb about that one. I've had a regular dvd-rom drive for a while too.

Anyways I have tried to read over the guides the best I could (that five days lasted a while), but I still have a couple things to ask. I've been using DVD Decrypter to rip a few DVD's to my hard drive and DVD Shrink to compress them mainly, and removed a few audio tracks to get a better compression rate. Out of the many methods and programs there are to re-encode and burn, etc, I'm wondering what is the best combination to use (based on peoples experience) that will help reduce the amount of time of the entire process. Basically I'm trying to find the quickest way from getting to the original DVD that I own, to having a backup DVD-r disk of it). I have a fair amount of DVD's to back-up, and any ways to save time would be great. It takes a while when I have to copy the files to my hard drive, compress/re-encode them, and then burn with nero to my DVD-R disc. I'll end up playing around more with the editing once I get more experienced. I don't want to jump ahead of myself yet until I completely understand the basics.

All the Dvds I've worked with have been dual-layer (from 6-8 gb on the dvd) which is why I ask about the best methods, otherwise I could just rip it to the HD then burn it (iso mode in decrypter). Another question I have is if it is possible to rip 2 dvd's at the same time (I have a dvd-rom drive and a burner on the same comp as I said earlier). Would the video files ripped onto the computer be corrupt or interfere with each other, or would this work?. Just a bit curious, thanks in advance, and hopefully these are acceptable things to ask.

- Steve

[Kedirekin]

"Best" is a matter of opinion, but there are probably many "good" answers.

My favorite backup process is:
- rip to ISO with DVDDecrypter
- compress to ISO with DVDShrink
- mount compressed ISO with daemon tools, check quality in software player
- burn compressed ISO with DVDDecrypter

This works for about 60%-70% of disks - the remainder either don't transcode well or have DVD-ROM extras that I want to back up.

You could probably reduce this to one step if you have two DVD drives (a reader and a burner) and Nero: rip and transcode with DVDShrink, and configure DVDShrink to burn with Nero after transcoding. The down side is you wouldn't be able to preview quality before commiting to DVDR.

I don't think there is anything physically that prevents you from ripping two disks at once, but I think it would actually slow you down. Constantly moving the read/write head to write to different locations on the hard drive slows write speed quite a bit. Of course, if you have an insanely fast hard drive, it might not matter.

Unfortunately I think you can only start one instance of DVDDecrypter. I believe it's coded to recognize when it is already running and not start up again. Of course, you could run two different rippers (DVDShrink and DVDDecrypter for example).

[earthslash]

Hmm, I didn't know you could compress an ISO file with DVD Shrink. Thanks for letting me know... I'm going to have to explore that program some more. I said best mainly because I was looking for answers based on others experiences, as I just started burning dvd's and havn't had a chance to use a lot of programs. The hard drive I use right now is a Western Digital 80 GB HD (8 mb cache, special edition).

Edit: Seemed to work ripping two at a time, although I cancelled it halfway through. One ripped at 2.5x, the other at 1.5x. I'll probably just stick to ripping one now and then using dvd shrink to remove unwanted files and compress the movie.

- Steve