Nostalgia: In praise of DVDShrink

[lingyi]

I just posted the following as a reply in a another thread and thought I'd create this thread per the title.

Addendum: I always thought DVDShrink didn't have CSS decryption capabilities, but have discovered it does. Though my limited experience* with using it to decrypt discs wasn't always successful. And since it was discontinued in 2004, it can't handle encryption schemes after that. IIRC, you could integrate DVDDecrypter with DVDShrink, but I always used DVDDecrypter separately.

*The majority of my discs are non-U.S./European and I've never encountered encryption on any Asian release.

-Cut and past from my previous post-

DVDShrink still has its uses. There are other programs like PGCEdit, for some things but DVDShrink is easier and quicker for casual users.

Here's an excellent full write-up of what DVDShrink can do: https://www.dvdshrink.org/guides.php

My highlights.

You can:

• Convert an animated menu to stills only, saving space and load time.
• Choose what you want, e.g. movie only, select extras, etc., while retaining the menu and access. I still do this with DVDs where I just want to remove the trailers.
• Quickly transcode from MPEG-1/2 to MPEG-1/2.* Thus the name DVDShrink. This was a big deal when the choices were basically .AVI, .MOV and .WMV for home consumers.
  *At the time, for a home consumer like me, the choices were DVDShrink or the full Tsunami MPEG Encoder, if you could afford the multi-thousand? dollar pricetag and time required. Later, a cheaper version of TMPEGEnc was introduced, but I never bother to shrink any of my videos, then and now.
• Seamless split a DVD-VIDEO into two parts* so you could save/burn a DVD-9 on two DVD-5. I never burned DVD-9, only DVD-5. Back then I would backup my DVD-VIDEOS on two DVD-5. You could later rejoin the split parts into a single DVD-9.
  *It would add a prompt at the end of DISC 1 asking you to insert DISC 2 ala Laserdiscs. IIRC, it also adds DISC 2 to the beginning of the second disc. When you combine the parts in DVDShrink, it automatically removes the additional info. Years ago, because of an utter brainfart moment, I lost hundreds of the ISOs on my hard drives and had to re-rip them all from my DVD-5 saved disc copies.
• Combine different discs/ISOs, choosing what you want into a new disc/ISO.

[hello_hello]

Memories...
For years I used RipIt4Me. I guess you could describe it as a front end for DVDDecrypter and DVDShrink.

[johns0]

I used dvdshrink many times in the past,some videos were crappy cause i used a low setting to compress,but it did the job very well for other sources.

[Ennio]

Yeah, I too used DVDShrink a lot in the dvd-days. I never knew that it could decrypt though.

[cholla]

I work mostly with DVDs.
So I still use DVDShrink.
One of it's best features is it is picky & if you open a "bad" rip it will give an error.
It is also good for separating episodes of a TV series when you want to eliminate the commercial menu.
So you can just select by the vob number of the episode.
Leaving out the size of the commercial menu & all the warning "crap".
If I want a simple menu I then use TitleWriter.
DVDShrink will still decrypt some DVDs.
If not I use AnyDVD HD or Passkey.