Partitioning

[resound]

Do I need to partition my computer in oter to copy 2 hour length homemade DVDs?

I have:

DELL Pentium IV, 2.53 processer
512 Memory
60 GB hard drive

NEC DVD +R/RW 1100A Writer
Samsung DVD-ROM

[Tommyknocker]

Not really. Partitioning comes in handy for capturing.

[SaSi]

A single 60Gb drive is a bit on the edge of being adequate for such tasks. Although spacewise it is enough, doing re-encoding work with a single drive will be overworking the drive and probably cause early death to it.

For DVD related work, it will be much safer and faster to work with two drives. Always use one as a source drive and the second one as the target drive.

My recommendation would be to obtain an additional drive of at least the same size. It would also be beneficial to partition your system disk drive.

A system disk rarely needs more than 5Gb. If you need to use big footprint applications (e.g. a full Microsoft Office of Visual Studio), then a 15b is more than enough for a system disk.

Partition the boot drive into 15 and 45 Gb partitions. Use the second partition to store Norton Ghost images of the boot disk as backups and to also store ripped DVD content or captured streams. The ghost images of the system drive will one day prove invaluable backups. It's a matter of time before you install a misbehaving codec that ruins your entire system. A ghost image taken as a snapshot will help you recover without tears.

Now to the encoding and conversion issues:
Using programs like an Mpeg encoder or DVD transcoders like DVDShring or DVD2One (and any other such program) is punishing for the HD if they both read and write to the same drive. It will be much better to use the extra new drive as a source and the second partition as a destination (or vice-versa; it doesn't matter).
If you don't do this, first you will find the process to be painfully slow (e.g. 60minutes for a DVD instead of 15). More important is that over time, this "punishment" to your drive will very likely get you a damaged HD. It's not that these programs destroy PCs or HDs. It's because HDs nowadays are not built with the same quality as they used to be a few years ago. "Punishing" a HD like this is like using it 5 or ten times more intensly and instead of operating flawlessly for 3-4 years it will be dead in 6 months to year.

BTW, if you decide to buy a new disk, once you install and format it, use it with a program like DVDShring to re-encode a DVD 5-6 times in a row. Or use 2-3 copies of DVDShring running concurrently to do that. If the disk survives this test, you can safely use it. If not, return it promptly for replacement as a dead-on-arrival device. Better that than to lose data. Believe me, I'm talking out of experience.

[resound]

Why is reincoding neccessary? Can't I just copy the disc as it is?