DVD authoring is and always has been a complicated and involved process. Some people prefer simple DVD duplication using programs like DVD Shrink for their DVD backup needs. This is fine if you prefer watching DVD movies on a regular television set, but there is inevitably some loss of quality. If you prefer to use your PC as your home media centre, or you have access to a HD TV, however, this is not an ideal solution. DVD movies are encoded using the lossless MPEG2 video format. While MPEG2 is capable of rendering high quality imagery, it does so at the expense of vast amounts of space on your hard drive or DVD media, and it is generally impossible to burn the ripped contents of a DVD-9 to a blank DVD. DVD Rebuilder uses a clever, unique method (that is beyond the scope of this guide) to resize DVD movies so they will fit on a regular blank DVD-5, with less quality loss than other free DVD re-authoring programs, and with greater ease than a proper transcoding package. This guide assumes you have pre-ripped your DVD files with something like DVD Decrypter.

First, download and install the full DVD Rebuilder package. After choosing an installation directory (default is fine), the installer will prompt you to choose a working directory. You'll need to choose a drive with at least 12 GB free. We recommend that you play it safe, and have no less than 16 GB free. You will also need to choose an output folder on the same drive, where Rebuilder will dump the finished product. When you've made your working directories, proceed through the installer.
Strictly speaking, DVD Rebuilder is what is known as a "frontend" for a number of different encoders, and a "frameserver" called AviSynth. It has the capability to work with the commercial CinemaCraft Encoder (CCE), and the free ReJig, EclPro (ProCoder), HC Encoder, and QuEnc encoders. Next the installer will prompt you to select which encoder you have installed. If you do not have any version of CCE, which is Rebuilder's preferred encoder, do not worry, as the package includes several free encoding engines which work quite well. Unless you actually have it installed, deselect CCE, and follow the instructions the installer gives for if you will be using the included QuEnc. You will get a warning message similar to this:
This guide assumes you don't have access to CCE, and will be using the QuEnc encoder. If you do happen to have CCE installed, browse to its path when prompted by the installer. Otherwise, just select any directory.
Let the installer finish, and start the program.

Once started, DVD Rebuilder should already have the Working Path and Output Path (which you configured during the installation process) filled out. It now needs to be directed to your pre-ripped DVD files. Before starting DVD Rebuilder, you should have used DVD Decrypter (in File Mode) to rip the files from your DVD to hard drive. Click the folder icon to the right of the Source Path field, and find where you ripped the DVD to.

Now, go up to the Mode menu, and select the QuEnc encoder (unless you have CCE). One way to boost the quality of the main body of the movie is to instruct DVD Rebuilder to encode the extras content at a lower bitrate. This will give it more room to play with for the main title itself, and hence, will be at a higher quality. In the example below, we have selected a 25% reduction of quality for extras content. Make your own choice as to how you want to do this step.
If you intend to leave it run overnight, you may wish to select the Shutdown at One-Click Completion option, which will automatically turn off your PC when the process finishes. On your first run, you might also choose to de-select the "Suppress Warning Prompts" option, which is on by default. This will help you work out if and when anything goes wrong.

At this point you need to make a decision about what you want DVD Rebuilder to do. Any encoding application is always a very CPU-intensive process, which means it will place a heavy load on your computer for a long time. (Between two and nine hours!) You can configure the encoder it to spend longer optimising the output, which will improve the final quality of your DVD, however, more intensive work will take longer. We recommend that if you are doing any encode, you allow the encoder as much time as it could want to perform its task: The encode only needs to be performed once, but any poor results of rushing it will be permanent. This may mean leaving your computer to run the task overnight. If you want to do a quick encode, however, you might choose to deviate from the example provided below, and select the "Standard Quality (Faster)" option.

Most video encoding applications have the option of performing what are known as 2-pass encodes. This means that the encoder will initially perform a quick analysis of the whole movie, during which point it is able to establish which parts of the movie will require a higher bitrate to maintain the same level of quality. For instance, a quiet, serene scene in a garden with slow camera zooms and pans will not require the same amount of data to render well as would a an action scene with erratic camera motion, explosions, and Samuel L. Jackson. On the second pass, an encoder is able to take the information it learned in the first, and adjust the bitrate to suit each scene. For this reason, one-pass encodes are sometimes referred to as Constant Bitrate (CBR), and 2-pass encodes Variable Bitrate (VBR). The advantage of a VBR encode is that it will maintain a relatively high level of quality throughout the movie. The disadvantage is that it takes considerably longer to initially encode. We recommend that you always select a 2-pass encode. If, for some reason, you are in a special rush, you can select the Single-Pass Encode option here. This mightn't be a bad idea for your first encode, just as a way of making sure everything works. Once complete, you can repeat the encode process in VBR mode.

Next, click Setup in the Options menu.

If you wish, you can configure some default options for DVD Rebuilder. Note that the program paths are each changeable from here. Should you later update or install another encoder, you can point DVD Rebuilder to it from this screen. The only other thing of note here is the option to remove extra subtitle (subpicture) and audio streams by default. If you know that you're never going to, for example, want to watch your favourite movie in Spanish, Faroese, or any language other than English, you can choose to have DVD Rebuilder strip it out by default. This will save some space if there are extra audio streams on the original disk, and thus, give you a slight improvement in quality. The easiest way to do this is to hit the "All" button for both, then manually uncheck the boxes that you wish to include, as in the example above. Remember to hit the "Save" button once you've changed these options, then click OK.

Now you're ready to begin. Click the "DVD Backup" button, and wait here for several hours. Alternatively, read on, then go do something else while your computer finishes the encoding process, which will take several hours.
During this time, DVD Rebuilder will start some other programs (QuEnc and AviSynth). Do NOT close these. Also note that your computer will be rather unresponsive during this time, as its CPU is under maximum load. Advanced users may wish to set QuEnc to a lower Base Priority using Windows Task Manager, and continue using their computer, running the encode in the background. When it eventually completes, browse to your Output folder, and burn the contents onto a blank DVD±R with your preferred DVD burning software.