Concerns about DVD backup

[MikeLarry]

I'm not sure if this is the right forum for this, but it seemed like the majority of the other ones did not want any questions pertaining to dvd to etc. So if I'm in the wrong here I apologize.

I'm considering backing up some of my dvds onto VCD. I've read both Sefy's guide along with the other guide on this site, by an author who's name escapes me at this time. In Sefy's guide in particular, he mentions that burning directly to a cd could damage your dvd drive. It appears that the other option would be to put the movie onto the hard drive first and then deal with it.

My questions:
1) How big of a risk of damaging your dvd drive are we talking about?
2) If I chose to send it to the hard drive first, would I still be able to fit the entire movie onto one VCD?

[sacajaweeda]

What is the point of switching from DVD to VCD in the first place?

[MikeLarry]

Well some of my older dvds are no longer produced. This way with a backup on a VCD, I can use that rather than risking damage to my dvd.

[sacajaweeda]

Huh?

[j1d10t]

Huh?

He doesn't want to damage his DVDs, because (it sounds like) they are no longer available, and he probably doesn't have a DVD burner, so he's going with the only other option - CD. He could also go from DVD to SVCD, but maybe his player doesn't support SVCD, so he wants to go to VCD.....

[MikeLarry]

I believe my player would support SVCD as well. But, can anyone answer my questions?

[FKrueger]

I usually don't burn "on the fly", just wasn't worth the risk. You can fit a movie on 1 cd using vbr, but it will result in really bad picture quality. If you have the ability control bitrates creating an xvcd, 2.0 mbps will fit 100min on 2 cdrs, and give you a pretty good picture.

[sacajaweeda]

Huh?

He doesn't want to damage his DVDs

Then don't open them.

[sacajaweeda]

I'm sorry, maybe I'm just missing something really obvious here.....how can you damage the DVD?

[bottle-necked]

I'm not sure I understand what you mean but if those movies are commercial ones you won't need to worry about burning direct from your DVD drive to your CD-Rom drive. That's not going to happen on this project.

To do this project with commercial DVD movies I would use DVD Decrypter and rip only the main movie to hdd and loose all the other junk. Take these vob files and demux them with TMPGEnc. Decide which audio steam I wanted to keep then take those 2 streams to TMPGEnc and reencode using it's VCD template. There are other encoding programs you could use but this is possibly the best. After all the Vob files are finished I would merge them together then cut into 2 equal parts. That should fit the movie onto 2 CD-R's if the running time isn't too long that is. Take those and create VCDs with your favorite program. I like VCDEasy, but if it's shareware I think it only allows files up to 400MB.....

This is a project that will work. You're going to loose quite a bit of quality but if you use the SLOWEST settings in TMPGEnc it might not look too awful bad.

Good luck.

[j1d10t]

Then don't open them.

I'm sorry, maybe I'm just missing something really obvious here.....how can you damage the DVD?

Maybe he/she has kids, and the kids like to get into the DVDs, and maybe they miss-handle them (i.e. touch them on the written part, drop them, use them as Frisbees, chew on them, eat them), I don't know. But if they aren't widely available for purchase (you can't pick them up at the video store anymore, and they cost a fortune on e-bay), then I can totally understand wanting to back them up, even if they are being backed up to VCD/SVCD. If you aren't too, too concerned about the quality loss when converting them to VCDs, then I say more power to you.

I wouldn't do a back-up "on the fly" - there are any number of problems you could encounter. If you have the HD space, I'd rip the DVD to your HD, then convert to VCD/SVCD.....

[macleod]

From my personal experience, buring directly from DVD to CD wont destroy your drive. I have read some information on this and it appears to be a urban legend. A few of the dvd to dvd and dvd to VCD/SVCD like dvdshrink and dvdripnburn take a piece of your video and encode it a piece at a time. Sorta like you are wanting to do.

The suggestions by some of the other forum members on this thread are valid (burning on the fly introduces other problems)

ON #2, standard dvd resolution/bit rate/audio will only allow you to fit a maximum of 80 minutes onto one normal cdr (there are 90 min cd's out there however). Most movies are longer than that, so the only way to get it to fit on one CD would be to go non standard vcd (basically lowering the bit rate from 1150 to something else.

[hech54]

If I chose to send it to the hard drive first, would I still be able to fit the entire movie onto one VCD?

MikeLarry,

You CAN make back-up copies of your DVD's with a computer DVD burner and FREE software available here on this website. If I were you I would buy a DVD burner for your computer instead of trying to cram them to a CD.

[nuwave221]

you should use smart ripper ,dvd2avi and tmpgenc to convert the dvds into vcd format or svcd format

[ghoster]

MikeLarry,

You CAN make back-up copies of your DVD's with a computer DVD burner and FREE software available here on this website. If I were you I would buy a DVD burner for your computer instead of trying to cram them to a CD.[/quote]

what he said. much eaiser takes a heck of alot less time and better results.

[Sefy]

@MikeLarry, the warnning in the guide is if you try encoding directly from your DVD drive, since it keeps the drive busy for hours, it overhears and it gets damaged, as an Example, I've used my Pioneer 106S to rip movies all this time, and I started with ripping speed of 14x, now i'm barely hitting 3x! and it also has problems reading regular CD/RW media.

Regarding Question #2, if you rip to the HDD, you can select whichever type of encoding methos you want, from VCD and above, the choice is yours

[gmatov]

Time for someone to say "There he goes, again. DVDx 2.2."

I used to use it with VCDs, and "on the fly", if you want to call it that, wouldn't hurt your DVD because it allowed you to "Save your DVD Drive" by ripping to a kind of RAM drive, set your buffer size in MBytes, say 100, and it would spin up, read 100MB to RAM, then work on it.

5 gig DVD would need 50 spinups and writes to RAM over maybe 3 hour period, 10 or 15 seconds run time exery 3 or 4 minutes.

AND, I was quite pleased with the result, built in calculator to damn near precisely fill 2 80 min CD-Rs, by adjusting bitrare. Not 796 MB on 1 disk, 200 on the other as DVD2SVCD would often give me.

Sefy,

I was pretty sure that was the intent of your warning. Since the prog works frame by frame, it would have to run constantly for as long as en encode took. That would be super rough on a ROM drive, if you did a lot, although a DVD player runs all the time you are watching a movie.

Cheers,
George

[Sefy]

@gmatov, don't forget that encoding takes a bit longer then watching a movie itself on any DVD, that's why it's rough on the DVD drive, if you try watching a movie on a DVD Player over and over and over again, trust me, it's gonna go bad as well