Software to Copy/Merge DVDs

[Tencntraze]

I haven't had to do much work with DVDs, aside from ripping and encoding them on my own computer, so I'm not sure what the best software for this is. Basically my mom has a bunch of mini-DVDs (from a camcorder) that can be read in a normal DVD drive and she wants to be able to take a few of these discs and burn them onto one larger disc that she can send to grandparents/etc. Additionally, she wants to be able to make copies or regular DVDs (legal, ones she recorded herself) and burn those, all on her laptop. Anyone have any good recommendations, free or otherwise? I've tried a couple ones I found on a google search but they seemed pretty crappy and were charging way to much for the limited functionality.

 

[QuixoticOne]

check these:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD_ripper
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtualdub
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AviSynth

Personally I'd take the video DVDs and rip them to files on the PC first of all. Then once that is done you can use some other utility like avisynth, virtualdub, some video editor program, etc. to edit / combine the individual disc videos into a longer video possibly adding some menus or whatever.

I assume the source DVDs are "video DVDs" and not "data DVDs" with AVI/MPEG/WMV type "files" on them that are intended to be played by a computer instead of a DVD video disc player.

You'll have to decide whether you want the product DVD to play in a computer as a collection of computer video files that you'd play in something like Windows Media Player or if you want to be able to make a DVD video disc which would play in a DVD video player device with menus and sub-chapters for the individual distinct videos contained on the disc etc.

In many ways it is easier to make a DVD disc with multiple computer format video files on it since you can use better compression like x264 / DIVX / etc. as well as having a simple way to just name the files according to their contents, put them in named / dated subfolders, etc.

If making a video DVD then you'll need some authoring software to take the edited input chapter videos and make the menu system and stuff for the disc.. there's freeware out there for that too.. dvdshrink, et. al. and some of the other ripper programs will have limited capabilities to do that.

 

[Tencntraze]

This is definitely helpful, and much of this I could do on my own (or could have tried a bunch of different things to get it to work through different apps). Problem is that I live in NY and my parents live in SC, and my mom is neither a programmer nor nearly as computer literate as I am, so it would be much better if there were a single package with a functional UI that my mom could use to do this on her own. If no one is aware of such things, I'll just play around with some of these ideas and try to put together a guide or such for my mom to use.

Additionally, the only use that she needs is to be able to play these in a standalone DVD player; all of the DVDs are currently 'video DVDs' and from talking to her it seems like she cares little about watching/storing it on the computer herself. I knew that she'd have to rip the data to the HD first (after all, not everyone has 4GB+ of free RAM available).

For a straight copy, I could probably get her to do what I do and just rip to an ISO and then burn that ISO to a new DVD, so the main problem is the merging of a few smaller streams.

 

[QuixoticOne]

Looks like DVD Shrink has a limited capability to do what you want (combining videos from different DVDs onto one output video DVD). I imagine that it may be a bit limited when it comes to choosing / quickly previewing the reauthoring encoding quality and selecting which of several videos may best be combined to fit a minimum number of combined output discs at the best quality.

http://club.cdfreaks.com/f72/g...-different-dvds-77155/
http://club.cdfreaks.com/f59/d...o-one-dvd-disc-153004/
http://forums.afterdawn.com/thread_view.cfm/505003
http://www.cdfreaks.com/softwa...Dshrink/DVDShrink.html
http://www.videohelp.com/tools/DVD_Shrink
http://www.videohelp.com/tools/sections/dvd-to-dvd