Shrinking an entire DVD, vs Just the film ?

[icarus_uk]

Hello everyone, I finally got to the point that my DVD collection is getting large enough, (and scratched enough) that I need to start backup up my discs.

Ive seen lots of different ways of doing this. They all seem to come down to two types;

1) Shrinking the entire contents of the DVD to fit on the smaller DVD-R.

And 2) Taking out just the movie and putting that on the disk, leaving off the menu and extras and things.

Which is better?

Of course the extras are always nice, but I would assume that to fit the entire disc contents on, quality has to be sacraficed. I want DVDs for crystal clear picture and dolby 5.1. Do I really want to shrink the entire DVD just so I end up with poor video tape quality and less than perfect sound? Or is the reduction in quality not noticable?

Everyones thoughts are appreciated.

[Dimmer]

That depends only on you perception of video quality and of course on your TV/monitor. Notice that audio always stays unchanged, it's not compressed by any program. Since the movies have different size, each may require a different level of compression in order to fit onto DVDR. Try both ways and see what suits you best.

One thing that saves a lot of space is removing all but one audio tracks. In case of full disc backup, keep only those extras you're interested in to reduce the compression ratio.

[Angelus]

It also depends on what program you use to "shrink" your dvd. DVDShrink is known as a transcoder and will produce worse quality than the Big 3 Method here on this site which uses CCE as an encoder. If you want to keep all the extras as they are, and have great quality for both movies and extras, you should take a look at The Big 3 method.

[killingspree]

"best is what works best for you" - rule 12 :D

anyway, i personally prefer the DVDShrink movie only method! i just keep the english and german DD sountrack (AC3) and the main movie!

this way i almost always get away with a compression >90% and a 1:1 copy of the audio tracks! honestly no quality decrease noticable there. not on my 17" TFT nor on my TV set!

if you then want to watch the extras one day again, just pop in the original disk! from my experience you'll watch the extras 2 or 3 times at max! so i guess the disk will survive those few cases of usage ;)

cheers
steVe

edit: oh damn, forgot: hi and welcome to the forum!!