I am seeking some advice on backing up a movie which is contained on a double-sided DVD-5 disk (the type you flip in your player to access the 2nd half). My goal is to backup the movie on a single DVD-5 disk, which obviously while require some compression. It is of no import to me that the movie have all the title menu's or not, as long as the actual movie itself is preserved on one disk.

Typically to backup movies I have been using a combination DVDShrink 3.2, DVD Decrypter, and Nero. Please advise.

Yeah, very easy - I've been doing exactly this for some time with great success. You'll need to use Shrink for both sides - open the first side, process the movie down to what you want (remove unwanted titles & audio/subtitle elements) in "Re-author" mode by dragging the main title over as per normal & create an ISO. Then put in the second side of the disc & open it.

Switch back to "Re-author" mode & drag the main title over as before. Now, hit CTRL-I (you must have the latest version of Shrink to do this). This will allow Shrink to open an ISO file directly without having to mount it first. This will bring up a browse window - just browse to the location of the ISO you just created. You will then have to select "Re-author" mode again, which will bring you back to the disc project you just started a moment ago. You will have the new ISO open in the right window (you may have to select the "DVD Browser" tab to see it), allowing you to just drag the title across to add to the current project. Then just continue to finalise the project as normal.

Thank you for your reply. Your technique did work except for 1 problem. I am unable to compress the entire movie enough to fit on one DVD-5 disk (the movie is over 4hrs). I am 'just' short by about 20mb, so I am attempting to burn it anyway and hope that my burner can 'overburn' this small amount. If this fails, what other options do I have?

For those that may be interested or have a similar dilema, I solved the size issue by re-encoding the files that DVD Shrink produced a 2nd time. The end result was that I got what I wanted, the movie did fit on 1 disk but there is some noticeable quality loss thanks to the heavy compression. Still the mission was accomplished and this will have to do until I get a DL capble burner.

if you're not satisfed with the quality, you can use dvdshrink to do the joining (with no compression) and then using one of the CCE solutions (such as dvd-rebuilder or dvd2svcd) to do the reencoding on the resulting output from dvdshrink.

I'm not sure why you've insisted on putting it onto 1 disc, but in cases of longer movies/extreme compression I usually just split it onto 2 discs - no compression, no loss of quality!

Hey, I'm pretty much new to these forums but i have a similer problem..

I recently borrowed a movie and it's Double Sided.. How do i go about putting the movie (wich has a Side A and Side B..) onto a singe DVD disk???

First you read the forum rules and then you go and buy a licenced copy of the movie before re-reading this thread.