Everybody and their mom knows that DVD's are the only movie format to buy or rent. With the prices so low on DVD writers so many people are uhhh... backing up their DVDs. It's rather surprising how much trouble some people are having doing this. For those kinds of people I have a few quick articles I'm putting together. This first one will be taking a DVD and putting it onto a DVD+/-R. The next one will be taking a DVD and converting them to my favorite codec Xvid. Both of these are really rather simple if you follow a few easy steps.

Disclaimer: The instructions here are only for backup purposes only. If you do not own the disc you are doing this to then you will be breaking the law. The disc I did this to is a part of my home collection.

DVD Shrink is by far the best tool out there for copying a full DVD onto your drive and also shrinking a dual layer disc so that it can fit on a single DVD+/-R. After you're done putting it on your hard drive burn the sucker using whatever your favorite DVD software is. BTW this will also make the disc region free if you leave the defaults alone! This'll be good for playing your imports on your stand alone DVD player.

Get this software here and lets get going. Obviously install it and open it Click on the open disk

After that this screen will pop up where you select which disc you want to open.

You'll see it basically scans over the content of the entire drive for a couple minutes. Then you'll see a screen with what it'll take to fit the contents of your selected disc onto a DVD+/-R. In this case it'll only be able to fit 55.3% of the video onto a DVD+/-R. If you're an image quality freak you'll want to do whatever you can to get this number higher. In this case It's Buffy season 1 disc 1. One thing you could do in the case of TV shows is fit an episode or two per blank DVD. OR

Uncheck whatever things you don't plan on using like foreign audio tracks and subtitles. It only ends up being 61.2% in this case. In the left bar clicking extras you can change the video to still pictures and uncheck the audio. This brings the video on the episodes up to 64.2% Nice and easy image quality boost for dumping the extras.