If you've ever tried to make a backup copy of one of your DVD movies, you might have discovered that there's a couple of problems that frustrate this, and that DVD duplication is not a straight-forward affair. To begin with, ripping the data from a DVD simply by copying the files to your hard drive is impossible, since DVD movies are encrypted with CSS. Second, once you get the movie onto your hard drive, you have to get it back onto a blank DVD. A DVD movie can be anywhere upwards of 6 GB in size, but a blank DVD±R is only 4.37 GB, meaning your movie simply won't fit! Fortunately, these hurdles have been crossed by many people before you, and a mature selection of free software has been created over the years that now makes it possible to rip data from a DVD, encode the movie to a more suitable format and size, and burn it off again to a blank DVD in your DVD burner. This guide covers the basic features of DVD shrink, a free DVD burning software application that re-encodes DVD rips to a smaller size, allowing users to make backups of their DVDs. This guide assumes you have already used a DVD ripper to get the DVD files on your hard drive.

For further information on DVD ripping please see this Guide to using DVD Decrypter.

MPEG2 is a pretty old format. The format doesn't have very good compression, and it's what is known as a lossless video format, meaning that what compression it does have is never performed at the cost of losing any video quality. This means that while MPEG2 is capable of rendering a very high-quality, high resolution, sharp picture, it only manages this with very large file sizes. There are more modern standards (any of the MPEG 4 formats, like DivX, XviD, or h.264, for example) that can be used to encode movies in just as high a bit-rate as a DVD movie (and therefore, similar quality), but which use a lossy compression algorithm, meaning some of the video data is inevitably lost. While these require much less space to store, transcoding a movie is a complicated, time consuming process which results in files that cannot be played back on most home DVD players.

DVD Shrink is not a transcoding application. Instead, it takes pre-ripped files from your hard drive and re-encodes the video stream in the MPEG2 format to a smaller file size, such that a DVD movie can be burned on a normal blank DVD-5. As mentioned, MPEG2 is a lossless format, and the files on a DVD are usually squeezed down as small as they can go without losing quality. DVD Shrink works by encoding the video stream in a lower bit-rate than the original movie, thereby saving some space. A DVD movie can be as big as 8.5 GB, whereas blank DVD media is usually 4.37 GB, meaning that the bitrate could be reduced by as much as half. This means that there will be some quality loss in almost any (A few movies manage not to break the 4.37 GB barrier.) DVD duplication project done with DVD Shrink.

Fortunately, the inherent quality of most DVD movies is so high that this will barely be noticeable on most displays to the untrained eye. Viewed on a HDTV or computer monitor, it will be easier to spot any quality loss, but on most televisions, it will usually be impossible to spot any difference, as TV resolution is simply too low for it to show. DVD Shrink is one of the easiest DVD ripping programs to use, and is arguably the most convenient way to copy a DVD, leaving menu, chapter, and special features functions in tact.

The first step is to actually get the software. While DVDshink.org produces the software and releases it for free, due to a fear of a pesky US law known as the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, they don't offer it on their website. Doom9 (Follow the links from Download to > Main Software Page) usually offers the most up-to-date version on his download page which will never carry viruses. Remember that DVD Shrink is freeware, so if you see a page trying to sell it to you, it's probably a scam.

The default installation options are fine, however, you will need a working directory on a drive that has more than 12 GB of space for your ripped DVD movie files, and for DVD Shrink's finished DVD image file. Once you've installed it, start the program. You should see a screen something like this: Once installed, select Preferences from the Edit menu. On the Preferences tab, make sure the target size is set to DVD-5, and each of the three checkboxes are checked.

Note: Any encoding process is a time-consuming task for a computer, be it encryption, archiving, or video and sound manipulation. This could take hours, depending on your CPU speed and load placed on the processor by other software. If you can spare the use of your computer while it runs, DVD Shrink will complete faster if you close all unnecessary software before you begin, and clear the “Run analysis in low priority mode” checkbox. If you intend to keep using your computer, leave it checked.

On the Preview tab, leave the checkbox ticked, and select Stereo or 5.1 output from the first dropdown box (whichever applies), unless you're using digital audio output (SPDIF). Select the VMR-7 renderer to lower CPU usage.
The default options on the Output tab are fine. You may wish to enable Logical remapping of enabled streams, which will renumber the audio and subtitle streams you choose to include to be consecutively numbered so there are no gaps. This cannot be relied on to work if the original naming conventions are anything but sensible, which is why it is not checked by default. If you're not sure what that means, do not worry, and leave it unchecked.

Note: P-UOPs (Prohibited User OPerations) are a feature that allows disk authors to disable things like skipping the copyright notice and studio splash screens that show when you first insert a movie into your player. DVD Shrink allows you to remove this annoying "feature" from your re-authored DVD backups.

Next is Stream Selections. Again, defaults here are fine. You will get a slight boost in the final picture quality by instructing DVD Shrink to strip out non-essential data streams, (especially unneeded audio streams) so if you know that you will only ever want, for instance, the English audio track and subtitles, select your preferred language from both dropdown boxes. If you have no need of subtitles at all, check the "Disable all subpicture except menus and forced streams" box.
Finally, File I/O. Make sure the first three checkboxes are marked. If you have Nero's DVD burning software installed, make sure the appropriate box is checked, otherwise, Shrink can burn disks by itself. Press OK to apply your options.

Click the Open Files button, and browse to where you've ripped your DVD to. DVD Shrink will begin a quick analysis of the files it has, showing you some of the frames from the movie every now and again. This shouldn't take more than a couple of minutes, depending on your PC. The system used for the above example image took less than a minute to analyse about 3 hours worth of content, on a 1.7 GHz CPU. If your system takes significantly longer, you've probably got too many background processes and unnecessary programs open.

When it's finished its pre-analysis, DVD shrink will show the results. Having analysed the IFO files, it knows where all of the chapters, menus, and titles are meant to go. The structure and components of the disk will show in the left-hand panel, and compression settings in the right. Exactly which items show up in these panels is different for every disk. If there's non-essential audio streams showing in the right hand panel (Director's commentary or other languages), you can choose to remove them by de-selecting them here.
In the example below, by expanding each of the components of the video shown in the left hand panel, and clicking the little play button below the preview screen, we are able to determine that (for this particular DVD) Title 1 and Title 2 under "Extras" are actually a copyright notice and an intro sequence from the studio that released the film.
If you wish, you can omit these by clicking the Re-author button up the top, however, you also lose all menu functionality at the same time. If you wish to do this step, click Re-author, and drag the components you wish to include from the right-hand panel, and drop them in the left. If you simply want a 1-to-1 copy, do not worry about this step.
Once you've made your choices here, you're almost ready. Click the Backup! Button.

Make sure you have the correct DVD burner selected, and that DVD Shrink has a directory to use for its temporary files on a hard drive with plenty of space.
On the Region tab, leave Region Free selected unless you have some special reason not to. If you don't care how long it takes DVD Shrink to finish (it could take several hours either way), check "Perform deep analysis" on the Quality Settings tab. This will improve the final output slightly. On the Options tab, you can set your computer to shut down when finished (it's a good idea to run it overnight, for example), and you have another chance to adjust the priority it runs at. Low priority will allow you to keep using your PC for other things while DVD shrink runs, but will slow down the process. Finally, on the Burn Settings tab, you can adjust the settings to suit your burner. Don't forget to insert a blank DVD±R in the drive before pressing OK. When it finishes, you should have a copy of your favourite movie!