First let me say I am a long time user of DVD shrink and think the program rocks (wish the author still developed it)

Second, I am one of those people that likes to keep menu's intact on dvd's I backup... I do this for maximum compatibility with picky dvd players, and also since I think it looks nicer. Because of this I don't like using the reauthor mode.

I want maximum quality on the movie, but don't care about menu or preview trailer quality, and I remove the extras.

That being said... I have come across many dvd's where the entire movie will fit if I could just recompress the menu and trailers/warnings/etc just a little more.

I don't like removing the trailers or warnings because I hate having a 5 minute long "this video has been removed screen" that I always need to skip through.

What I would really like is some hack that would enable maximum compression, say 90% even, for the trailers and menu. Is there any such beast? DvdShrink seems to limit the shrinking to about 60% or so.

One work around I have found, is to compress everything to max (except for the movie, which I do with no or very minor compression) then I set dvd shrink for dual layer mode.

Once it copies to a folder, I reload the files from the folder into shrink, and recompress the Trailers again until it will fit on a Single layer dvd.

Is this a crazy thing to do? Is there a better way to do what im trying to do without using 5 different applications?

In my opinion this is a good trick

Thanks for the suggestion

Anyway you can use a software like vobblanker to remove all undesidered stuff retaining menus.

You can find guides here

Thanks for the reassurance that im not crazy

I will play around with Vobblanker and see how I like it...

Also one other suggestion that is more obvious... You can sometimes save 100s of megabites on extras if you replace the standard Dvdshrink "this video has been removed" with another one that is mostly black with just small white text saying "this video has been removed".

Sounds like vobblanker is the best choice tho, just wish it was somehow integrated into one app with dvdshrink.

Thanks for the trick

Actually vobblanker is a good choice. It's a little intimidating at first, but there are many guides available. And it remove completely undesidered stuff from vobfiles instead to do compression like shrink.

After vobblanker you can use shrink on the "blanked" vob files and use a better compression retaining all menus

Some people already do that.

You will save even more room by using a plain black screen by creating a jpg. It will shrink 1GB to 30GB-40GB.

Also a program called menu shrink will shrink a meu by turning each screen into a single frame and still retains functionality. I have gone from 1.5GB menu down to just 30MB.

Neat trick to be able to do that.

As already mentioned, you can use Vob Blanker to remove unwanted video. You can use MenuShrink to convert motion menus into still-image menus (which saves space).
Apparently nwg already has Blu-Ray discs available for use.

Oops. Obviously, I meant 1GB down to 30MB or 40MB.

We know, we're just kidding.

DVD Rebuilder http://dvd-rb.dvd2go.org/