Say you have shelled out some $30 for the DVD LOTR Two Towers and you want to loan out that DVD to your neighbour. Wouldn’t you be mad when they return it with scratches on it? I rent a lot of DVD’s and when you get them they look like crap. It is as if people use them as a frisbee or a coaster or let their dog chew on it. That’s the reason I just make a bakcup of my DVD’s and give the copy to whoever wants to see it. That way I make sure my DVD’s stay in perfect condition.
Now, you ask yourself, how the heck would you make a backup of a dual layer DVD that can have about 9gig of data on it to a single layer DVD that has about 4.22gig of data? Well I discovered it is pretty easy. What you need is a program that can extract the movie and then processess it (i.e. shrinks it) so it wil fit on a single layer DVD-R/+R/-RW/+RW. For that reason I bought DVD2one. It is a kick-ass program that will copy either the full DVD (with all menus) or just the movie to just one single layer DVD-R/+R/-RW/+RW. And the best news: this program is available for either Windows users and Mac OSX users!
The catch is that you need a pre-processing tool like DVD Decrypter to “rip” the DVD to your harddisk, since DVD2one can’t do that, and also need a tool to burn the DVD like Nero Burning Rom. But the combination of these tools is way better than the programs that supposedly do all-in-one.
The benefits of this wonderfull piece of software are:
- World’s fastest video compression engine. Process a movie to fit on a single recordable in a matter of 15 to 30 minutes (depending on the speed of your computer).
- Makes movies-only copies. Why waste space and image quality on unnecessary intros, menus and language tracks?
- Makes also full disk copies. For those who want to keep those fancy menus and intros.
- Powerful join mode. Useful for putting multiple episodes of a (tv) series or joining both sides of a flipper on 1 disk.
- Written from scratch, it’s not based on any old code, libraries or existing opensource projects.
- Time critical parts written in assembly, for the highest possible speed.
- Burn the movie with your favorite recording software!
- Both PC Windows and Mac OS-X versions available.
So, if you have the same idea about leaving your precious DVD’s intact, I would say: shell out the money for DVD2one and never be afraid to get your DVD back as a coaster 😉