To Copy or Not to Copy

[bryankendall]

I have DVDs that I made. I regularly copy these for friends by using these programs: NERO, Clone DVD2 and B's Recorder GOLD. They work fine.

QUESTION: My goal is to be able to duplicate the DVDs WITHOUT copying from the original DVD to the blank DVD. I would like to put the VOB files, etc. on my computers C Drive. Then somehow create the DVD from those files, directly.

I know I can duplicate a CD directly from wave files on my C Drive. Is there a way to do this with DVDs and their VOB, and other, etc. files.

Thank you

bryan kendall

[mats.hogberg]

Rip your DVD to ISO with DVDDecrypter. When you need a copy, just burn the ISO with the same, or ImgBurn.

/Mats

[kschang]

If you have the entire VIDEO_TS folder you can do it with ImgTools

[mats.hogberg]

Easier to keep track of one file (the iso) than folders with files - but that's me...


/Mats

[bryankendall]

I appreciate your suggestion. Everything is working fine with converting my DVDs to ISO files with DVD Decrypter ........then converting the ISO files back to DVDs with Imgburn. Now I have all my important DVDs on my harddrive (In ISO files format) and I can make the original DVD directly from these ISO files. GREAT!!

ONE SMALL PROBLEM:
I have a movie that I made a ISO file of, on my harddrive. It works fine .......................except it is 6.7 gigabytes. The Problem? I cannot convert it back to a DVD using Imgburn because it is 6.8 gigabytes and a DVD-R only holds 4.7 gigabytes. How do I compress the ISO file so it is 4.7 gigabytes or less? How would I do this?

Thank you for your interest.

bryan kendall

[yoda313]

simple - use dvd shrink. Click File - open disc image. THen you can shrink it from there.

[redwudz]

The easiest way would probably be to extract it back to a DVD folder with a tool like ISOBuster or similar and run it through DVDShrink to reduce the size, then convert it back to ISO. Try opening the ISO with Shrink first and see if it accepts it and that would simplify the process. I'm assuming it is a DVD video format. Except for Shrink, none of the other processes should affect the quality.

EDIT: yoda313 was quicker. It took me a minute to remember Shrink can accept ISOs.

[RowMan]

Open your ISO file in DVD Shrink and compress it. You can then output a smaller ISO that will fit on to a single layered DVD. You MAY notice a slight degradation in picture quality as DVD Shrink will transcode the video to a lower bitrate in order to make the files smaller.