Converting from a DVD-5 to a DVD-R with as little space used

[Poggle]

as possible I have 12GB free on my 19GB hard drive with as much stuff that I don't need backed up.

I have a non-anamorphic R3 NTSC DVD-5 that I want to convert to an anamorphic R1 NTSC DVD-R using as little space as possible.

I've never copied discs before, so I don't know how the process of changing a region code is from changing the region code+video format, but I doubt it should be as much of a hassle.

[guns1inger]

Download DVD Decrypter (search in the Tools section). Install it, put your DVD original in the drive. Select Mode->ISO->Read from the menu. Choose a location, and click on the big DVD>HDD button. This will create a disk image of the original, but without any copy protection or region codes. Now replace the original with a new blank disk. From the menu select Mode->ISO->Write and choose the MDS file just created. This will load the image. Press the burn button to write it to the blank.

This will require around 4.35 GB of HDD space, depending on how full the original is.

Edit : Sorry, just re-read your post. The above will give you an exact copy. Why do you want to create an anamorphic version from a letterbox version. You can't improve the quality, you can only degrade it by the process of conversion and resizing. You are better off keeping it as letterbox.

If you do want to change it, you need to

Rip the movie
Demux the video and audio
Convert the video to uncompressed or losslessly compressed avi
Resize and crop to meet anamorphic sizing
Re-encode the video back to mpeg2
Re-author the video and audio to a new DVD

Unless you use a highly compressed intermediate codec, such as xvid, for the resizing stage, you won't do this in under around 30gb of space, and probably more.

[manono]

Hi-

If you don't care about the menu, and don't have subs, you can demux the audio and video, and get the chapters by using DVDDecrypter in IFO Mode, with Stream Processing. That way, your 12 GB of hard drive space may be enough. If you want to keep the menu, you decrypt the whole thing in File Mode.

Convert the video to uncompressed or losslessly compressed avi

I must be misunderstanding you here, guns1inger, because I see no possible reason for creating an intermediate AVI, uncompressed or otherwise. Make a Movie.d2v Project File with DGIndex from the demuxed Movie.m2v, and using that in an AviSynth script file, do the necessary crop and resize to convert to 16:9. Encode, run Pulldown, Author, and Replace it in the original DVD (if keeping the menu). I don't see any way to do all that with only 12 GB of space, though. I suggest that Poggle buy himself another hard drive.

Edit: Well, I think I see what you're driving at now. You make a, say, 1 GB AVI, and then toss the original demuxed Movie.m2v. You can't create an uncompressed AVI, of course, as there goes the 12 GB and a whole lot more. You'll still have the original DVD files on the HD (4+ GB). You have an additional 1 GB AVI. You still have to encode back to MPEG-2 (~4 GB), and create a newly authored DVD (4+ GB). I don't think it can be done starting out with only 12 GB.

[Abond]

Process only one vob at a time. It may work.

[guns1inger]

I still come back to my first question - why bother ? What's to be gained ?