Making song DVDs with menus

[navatweb]

I use DVDShrink to backup Indian movies. These movies tend to be very long, about 2.5 to 3 hours, and they have 4 to 7 songs in each. Songs are fun to watch on their own.

I want to make a DVD of songs from multiple movies. I believe I can use re-author in 3.0 beta 5 to do that. Basically, I was thinking of adding the movie multiple times, and then using the start-end to cut the songs. And do likewise over multiple movies.
This will allow me to watch songs without menus. Will I at least get a chapter at the start of each song?

I know I cannot get menus by just using DVD Shrink. Can I create the vobs using DVDShrink and then use some other program to author the menus? I have access to DVDComplete, MyDVD and CCE Basic.

I'd appreciate an easy way to do this. I also hope that a full re-encode will not be required.

Please suggest any free tools and how to use them, or point to guides online. If free tools are not sufficient or convenient, tell me about any commercial tools.

[Vejita-sama]

If you plan to mix and match different DVDs to one DVDR then of course a full re-author will be necessary (prehaps you meant to say that you wanted to avoid a full re-encode. There is no need to re-encode only re-author).

There are several ways to do this. I'm not familar with your software (save for CCE). But here's what I'd recommend:

1. Run Smartripper and De-mux the m2v & ac3 file for each area of interest
2. Load elementary streams in authoring program, plus simple menu and re-author.

Or you could use DVD Shrinks re-author option as you stated above but have no menu.

1. Rip all desired DVDs to HD (takes up alot more space)
2. Select re-author, and load/que all desired title sets from each DVD
3. Click backup to generate new VIDEO_TS folder

Each titleset will get it's own chapter point. However there is no easy way to add a menu to the DVD Shrink generated VIDEO_TS. The reason is that DVDs use a file structure not a file format. So you can't just cut/paste stuff in or out.