experience dvd copy programs

[surfer]

What are your experiences with:
Dvd shrink
pinnacle instant copy
dvd2one

With making a dvd copy from a 2 layer dvd to one DVDR?

Which is the easiest to use?
Which makes the best quality?
Which one has the least problems?

Please share your opinion.
I know there are manuals one the left side of the screen but i want to know from as much people what the experiences are.

[Benzima]

I began as a huge DVDXCOPY fan, then DVD2One then Instant Copy. Approximatly ~8 months of experience and the recent purchase of a Sony DVPCX875P changer has brought me to following strategy:

DVD5: DVDDecrptyper read/write
DVD9, movie is all I must have, movie only is < 5.5G: DVD2One
DVD9, movie only > 5.5G: DVDXCopy on 2 disc, keep entire DVD
Episodic: Instant Copy

I've backed up ~ 350 titles. I wish I had developed and stuck to this guideline for all of them, but I was learning as I went along so I have no regrets. Many of the newer programs, I have never even tried because I was always able to achieve my goals with the above.

[Bob W]

Which is the easiest to use? DVD2one
Which makes the best quality? Most likely Instant Copy.
Which one has the least problems? I have never had any problems with any of them.

I use DVD2one more than the others, but this is because I could care less about any DVD extras or menu on a backup DVDR (plus it is fast).

[poopyhead]

dvdshrink works quite well for DVD9->DVD5. i personally would like to keep everything intact in the DVD, while not having to spread the DVD9 discs to 2 DVD5....too expensive, longer time, and DVDXCOPY been giving errors.

however, for those huge DVDs, DVDshrink would require compression of 50%. the main movie still looks great at that compression ratio on my 32" TV. however, the extras become noticeably worse....however, i suspect that the extras weren't encoded with a high bitrate to begin with, so compressing those by 50% would produce noticeable artifacts...but overall, i'm pretty happy with it.

pros:
1) it's free
2) it's one of the fastest, if not THE fastest
3) constantly being updated, so bugs get fixed pretty quickly

cons (at least for me):
1) filesize prediction isn't very good.... (i.e. if dvdshrink predicts the output filesize is going to be XXX MB, it may end up being XXX + 30 MB) so, if you're trying to fit as much as possible on a DVD-R, you might sometimes go over the limit
2) the compression ratios are given in 5% increments (i.e. 5, 10, 15,...., 50% compression) there is NO slider bar where you can adjust the compression by increments of 1%. this can be a problem if 15% compression of the main movie would be 1 MB over the limit. however, the next compression level of 20% might leave like 100 MB of extra space on the DVD-R.

update: just to clarify, the 5% increments hasn't really bothered me very much though because if there's any extra space, i can decrease the compression level for the menus, main movie, and extras separately, rather than as a whole. so, usually extra space on the DVD-R isn't a problem....

[andkiich]

So far, for my needs, DVDShrink does everything that I need. 've just begun to touch the surface on what I want to do with this whole DVD burning stuff, so my "needs" may chnage in the future. But for now DVDShrink is easy, quick, and has worked every time.