I've just recently bought my first DVD burner - Liteon 812S (mainly due to the threads I've read in the Forums here).

So far so good, I can copy onto DVD-R and DVD+R and both play quite happily in my 3 1/2 year old DVD player. So I'm starting to make back-ups of my DVD collection for holiday use etc. One of my first challenges is to try and copy The Lord of the Rings part 1 Extended version onto a DVD-/+R. The original film is split onto two DVD9 discs.

How do I go about ripping and joining the VOB's together and then using Clone DVD to transcode them to DVD5 ?

Both films together will be about 3 1/2 hours long (deleting the 20minute fan club credits at the end). I've already copied Braveheart onto a DVD5 which is nearly 3 hours long and I'm quite happy with the compression that needed to take place, so I think the above should be possible.

Your best bet is to use DVD Shrink. First, use the Re-Author function to take only the movie (leaving credits and menus as those will take a lot of room) of the first disc. Do not shrink this down, just make it into an .iso file. Now, use Daemon Tools to mount the .iso file you just made. Then, go into DVD Shrink again and load both the 2nd disc and the 1st disc (from the virtual drive). Now, just the Re-Author function again, putting both halfs back-to-back. Use the compression needed to shrink it down to size and presto! you got your movie.

(in reply to Reslo)

Good job vbguru

(in reply to vbguru_12000)

Just to warn you, there will probably be some quality loss between the origional and the copy. Still, it shouldn't look that bad.

(in reply to emperor)

What sort of Quality Loss ???

(in reply to Dolphinius_Rex)

Should be about the same quality as the Braveheart copy he made.

(in reply to Laffin Assassin)

Thanks for that VBGURU, I've downloaded Deamon Tools and will give it a try tonight.

I'll keep you informed of my progress.

(in reply to vbguru_12000)

[Deleted by Admins]

(in reply to Reslo)

I got to work at it last night. I followed all your steps VB but DVD Shrink failed joining the two together when reading the second disk directly from the DVD-ROM. So I ripped both DVD's and emulated both and hey presto no problems.

One piece of advice to anybody else trying this is that DVD-Shrink could not fit the two pieces together onto a DVD5 unless I deleted all the credits (some 30 minutes worth). I always thought that Shrink would compress any size file to fit even if it meant a crappy bit rate, or am I wrong?

Anyway, its done now and the quality seems OK on my monitor but the colour is a little weird. I'll burn it tonight and let you know how it looks on screen.

(in reply to Deleted User)

Glad to be of help. Don't know why it didn't work from the second disc, but then again, I've never tried the method so I couldn't tell you.

The standard DVD-R can hold approximately 2 hours of uncompressed video. Compressing 3.5 hours into this would be about 47% compression, near the limit of DVD-Shrink.

btw, the quality will seem a lot better when played on a TV then on you monitor. This is because computer monitors have a much higher resolution. One also typically sits closer to a computer monitor then a TV. If the quality looks good on a computer monitor, it should be undistinguishable on a TV screen.

(in reply to Reslo)

I've seen backups of Babylon 5 (4-5 hours of video I believe) onto DVDR that looked absolutely atrocious even on a TV screen!

(in reply to vbguru_12000)

[Deleted by Admins]

(in reply to Dolphinius_Rex)

quote:

ORIGINAL: Dolphinius_Rex

I've seen backups of Babylon 5 (4-5 hours of video I believe) onto DVDR that looked absolutely atrocious even on a TV screen!

Perhaps they were done on a Liteon !!!

(in reply to Dolphinius_Rex)

Pioneer DVR-105 I believe, either that or an LG 4040B, but more likely the Pioneer.

(in reply to Laffin Assassin)

I did one with the LiteOn and the results were undistinguishable with the human eye, except on my HiDef TV... regular TV's you can't tell the difference.

(in reply to Dolphinius_Rex)

OK boys and girls the results are in...

Quality on the TV screen was near perfect. There were obviously areas (usually large landscape shots) where you can see
pixelation occuring but nothing at all wrong with Head shots and the like.

The burn created two titles though which meant a 2-3 second delay when one ends and the other starts. It doesnt bother me too much after all I have got what I wanted, but a smoother transistion would be great. Is there anyway to join the two images into one title?

I'll have a look at trying it with DVD2ONE. Failing that I may (for the craic) have a go at encoding them into Mpegs or AVI's and editing them together into one SVCD. May be an interesting excerise if nothing else.

(in reply to MP3Mogul)