Burn DVDs with DVD ShrinkPosted by Andy Atkinson on February 14, 2006 | Post type: Gain DVD Shrink is a lightweight, freeware, windows application that makes DVD burning easy. If you have a DVD burning drive, you can rip and burn a DVD by following just a few steps. A couple of years ago, I would have to use something like DVD Decrypter to decode the built-in encryption on the DVD, then rip the disc to an image on my hard drive, then use a burning utility like Nero to burn the image. DVD Shrink simplifies this process, down to one click if you have two optical drives.
DVD Shrink is free software that makes ripping and burning DVDs very easy DVD Shrink takes you from start to finish with just one piece of software and using just one drive (if that is all that you have). Of course, if you have two optical drives in your computer, say, a DVD-ROM and a DVD±RW, you can rip an image with one drive, load a disc in your DVD±RW, then burn the image from the hard drive to the second drive when it is done ripping from the first drive. In addition to its ease-of-use, DVD Shrink lets you burn discs as region-free by first decoding their encryption, then burning an image WITHOUT a region code embedded in the files. In other words, you can buy a Region 2 DVD from the UK, and play it in a Region 1 USA DVD player by first backing it up using DVD Shrink. At the time of this writing, most store-bought DVDs are pressed on a dual-layer DVD9 discs that hold approximately 8.5GB while most of the blank DVD-Rs or DVD+Rs that consumers purchase at electronics stores are single-layer (DVD5) discs. What this means is that you have to "shrink" the file sizes from DVD9 media in order to back it up to the blank DVD5 DVD-Rs you just bought from Best Buy. Many people are now buying DVD burning drives that are dual-layer compatible (i.e., they burn DVD5 and DVD9 media), but the actual DVD9 media remains expensive and more difficult to find. DVD Shrink lets you re-encode (shrink) the file sizes easily, and gives you complete control over the .VOB (menus, feature, audio, etc.) files. What this means is that you can take a particular chunk of the movie, say, a special "featurette" that was included on the disc, and choose to reduce it’s quality by 50%, thus reducing the file size from, e.g. 1GB to 500MB. This gives you more room on your disc for the movie file itself, which is where quality is most important. You might ask, "If I reduced a movie file to 50% of its original, would it not look poor?" Not really. If you are watching a re-encoded DVD on a standard definition TV, it is difficult to notice the difference. However, it should be noted that if video quality is very important to you, you may want to purchase the movie (or an additional copy) or back it up to DVD9 media. Then again, you could wait for it to be released on Blu-Ray or HD-DVD. DVD Shrink also allows you to reduce audio file sizes, or even cut out audio files altogether. For example, audio portions of movies are displayed as files, 1 for stereo in English, 1 for surround sound in English, 1 for stereo in Spanish (for example). Audio options vary from movie to movie. In order to save space, you can simple remove the "2-channel Spanish" audio file (for example), and free up hundreds of megabytes, which can be used for the main feature. DVD Shrink will automatically increase the size (with a convenient slider bar) of the actual movie file with each "non-essential" file that you either reduce or eliminate. The official DVD Shrink website can no longer host the installation files for this application due to "U.S. Laws." However, you can download the ZIP file of version 3.2 right here. About the author(s) Andy started Pain in the Tech in 2005 as a way to share tips and tutorials with friends and family, and evangelize great products and services. By 2008, Pain in the Tech had 7 contributors, thousands of daily page views. Site ownership was transitioned to Matt Thommes in 2008. Comments
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