Main Movie Only With Menus

[-DVD-]

Hi, I have bee, using DVD2ONE mostly to back up my DVD's and normally do full disk copy on Ritek G04's. With some films this looks good but with my region 2 version of rush hour 2 (crammed with special features) the main movie looked very blocky. Could anyone recommend a program or guide which would enable me to keep the main movie but also keep the menus aswel. I have tried the trial of Clone DVD which has now expired and I do not have the funds to by myself a copy at the moment.

Any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks.

[bugster]

Your topic has been moved to a more appropriate forum. I think you are more likley to get the necessary info here.

Bugster

[SaSi]

Actually, the best program to do this comes for free. Here is what I did with an almost identical case (Shakespeare in Love - 7,69Gb).

The programs you need are:

DVDShrink (Free)
DVD2One (you already have it).

The general idea is that you pre-process the DVD content with DVDShrink and then re-encode with DVD2One.

Open the VIDEO_TS folder with DVDShrink.

Select a custom Target DVD Drive size and enter a large size (I use 9Gb). This will avoid warnings that the result won't fit on a DVD.

Select Next and then Re-Encode and then Next

DVDShrink will scan the contents and suggest the various levels of compression giving variable target sizes all unsuitable (For SIL it gave me 6.7 to 4.47 Gb).

Select Customize streams

It will bring up a list of the available VTS with their sizes. Here you can chose what to remove and what to keep.

What I normaly do is to remove unwanted audio streams (sometimes an uncompressed audio stream takes up almost 1.5Gb) while translated audio streams are useless for me so I remove them. I also remove unwanted subpicture streams, although they don't really take up too much space.

Finaly, you can choose what to do with the extras.

Some DVDs have other movies trailers as extras. I remove them. If there are extras about the film production, I may want to keep them (especially if I have already removed quite a few audio tracks).

On the bottom right corner, DVDShrink shows the resulting size after the surgical removals. Once the size goes down to 5-6Gb, you can press OK.

Then press Next and enter the directory where you want the DVDShrink output to be stored.

Have DVDShrink produce a re-authored and re-encoded (for some of the streams) DVD.

Once it finishes, have DVD2One process the DVDShrink output to make a full disk target bringing the size to 4.36Gb.

The result is the best compromise between good picture and keeping as much content as possible.

If you don't already have it, update your DVD2One copy to version 1.2.0. It does variable bitrare transcoding and this can work miracles in cases where you are crammed with content.

Will be very interested to receive comments and perhaps improvements.