Originally posted by: BPB
Thanks Xtremist. I was hoping that would be the answer. How long would you guess it'll take me to get comfortable with this software? I currently use DVD X Copy Platinum and can't burn many episodic DVD's, which is why I'm giving this a try. It's amazing to me how many DVD's X Copy can't handle.
Well, it depends. If you want to do pretty much full DVD backups (maybe taking out foreign audio tracks), then it shouldn't take you long at all, like 5 minutes maybe? Picking and choosing (re-authoring) a DVD to get a better quality DVD, but taking out menu's, chapters, etc... takes a little bit longer to learn how to use, but that was mainly cuz I'd never done it before (only made full disc backups till last week). Actually choosing which titles to include in a re-authored DVD isn't hard, but sometimes it's hard to know which extra features are which just based on the title number without watching them. What I do is download Filemom from the guys at
http://www.sysinternals.com/, run it and filter for whatever DVD player you use. Then I launch the DVD, select the features I want to make sure to include and check out what VOB filemon says the player is reading. Then I look and see the filesize in Explorer and then I can compare that to similar file sizes displayed in DVD Shrink. Sounds like it might be tough, but it's not really and in most cases probably not even required, just depends on many titles the DVD has.
The other thing that kinda got me for a few minutes was that sometimes there are two title sets that when you play/preview in DVD Shrink look IDENTICAL. And I had no idea which one to choose. I wasn't paying close enough attention though ;-) After loading Filemon again to try and see what was going on, it hit me that one set was full screen and the other was widescreen. Sure enough, preview again in DVD Shrink and one set was full screen, the other was widescreen. With those kinds of disk's, you shouldn't have any problem backing up the entire movie without any compression whatsoever (just cut out whichever format you don't want).
It's all pretty easy to use I think. I also think there's been some links to tutorials posted already in this thread that explain how to do all this better than I can on the fly

Good luck.
[EDIT]Fixed link.[/EDIT]