Posted by janet on 01/03/08 15:11

Hello, group members. Just thought I'd let you know that this "janet"
person writing these posts "for a friend" stole my identity for use
here. Didn't know that I knew so much about DVD archival! Cheers!

the real janet




On Dec 15 2007, 7:35 pm, janet <jan...@sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> I wrote this for a friend and just wondered if experts on this newsgroup
> could critique my explanation and improve the steps for me and my friends.
>
> Here is how to archive your DVDs, using 100% freeware, without wasting time
> watching boring and non-skippable idiotic trailers!
>
> 1. Always use DVDShrink freeware first 'cuz it works most of the time and
> is easy and takes the least amount of disk space and time and effort.
>
> No thinking; just hit the "Re-author" button, choose the main movie title &
> press the backup button. Three easy steps.
>
> 2. Run three additional steps that are optional, but which result in better
> burns. First, you can hit the "compression" tab in DVDShrink and remove
> spurious languages so that you compress less. Second, I generally hit the
> "Analyze" button so that every frame is analyzed for custom compression.
> Thirdly, you can hit the double-arrow button to clip the beginning and/or
> end of the movie so that it starts and ends with just the movie and none of
> the "universal studios" logo crap.
>
> 3. Sometimes DVDShrink fails. You'll know it fails if it gives any kind of
> error. Or if the main movie shows up as something way less than 3 to 6
> Gigabytes. Just give up when you see an error; don't try to work around it.
> For example, if the main movie shows up as 500 Mbytes, then don't even
> think of using DVDShrink. DVDShrink will fail about 5 or 10% of the time
> nowadays. When it fails, you have to add two extra steps in front of DVD
> Shrink. These work 99% of the time; and when they don't, someone fixes
> these programs (see below) so that they work 100% of the time.
>
> 5. The first extra step that works 99.9% of the time is to run DVD HD Fab
> Decrypter freeware. Rip the entire movie to your hard drive. I'm not sure
> why; just do it (that is, don't rip just the main movie). This will take
> about 9 GBytes of disk space on your hard drive.
>
> 6. Then, after ripping the entire movie to your hard drive, run FixVTS
> freeware to fix any bad blocks. Just drag any of the VOB files onto the
> FixVTS GUI and tell it to fix the entire DVD in place (don't bother with a
> backup which takes twice as much time and disk space for no gain).
>
> 7. Once you've run FixVTS freeware on the entire ripped movie, then go back
> to step 1 above and use DVDShrink to shrink it to 4.7Gbytes. You'll notice
> you need about 9 + 5 = 14Gbytes for the original and shrunk version, so
> that is why you don't do this step first.
>
> 8. Once you have a DVDShrink result which works, the last step is to burn
> the 4.7GB VIDEO_TS and (empty) AUDIO_TS folders to the root of a
> good-quality DVD disc as data. I use ImgBurn freeware because it's a fine
> program by a fine programmer; but you can use whatever you want.
>
> 9. Lastly, use only good-quality DVD disc media. You must know the "Media
> ID" of your DVD discs. This sucks but that's the way it is. See this URL
> for a description of good-quality DVD media. Within certain constraints,
> quick practical advice is three steps. First, print out the Media ID guide
> located athttp://www.digitalfaq.com/media/dvdmedia.htm
> Second, "try" to select a brand/model from that guide. Third, use your
> ImgBurn freeware to identify the "Media ID" (it's in the log file) when you
> burn your DVD image to disc. If you're lucky, you bought good-quality
> media. If not, try again until you find good-quality media. Once you have
> good-quality media, stick with it.
>
> 10. Enjoy your archived movie, without all those annoying trailers! When
> your backup gets scratched, repeat the procedure keeping your original DVD
> dics pristine.
>
> Please critique this process so we all learn better techniques.

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