After playing around with DVD2One 1.1.1, 1.1.3, 1.2.0, DVD95Copy 1.5, InstantCopy and DVDShrink 2.3 I come to the conclusion that DVDShrink is different. On many DVDs I try, using DVDShrink 2.3 in Full Disc mode, I cannot fit everything on a DVD-5 re-compressed. Instead I have to remove some audio tracks and that usually helps.

For example, on "The Animatrix", it is impossible to keep all audio tracks even with level 10 compression on all the video titles. I have to remove Japanese audio and then compress the menu a bit.

Not that I really need the other audio tracks, but this makes it not as flexible as other programs. It seems that its level settings are calculated based on the video only. If it takes into account the size of the audio tracks it could offer another level to compress everything with all audio tracks and fit on a DVD5. I think it needs another couple levels of higher compression and it would be perfect!

I am just curious because I don't see any discussions on this limitation and just read how many are using DVDShrink with great success. Am I missing something here?

Ok, I found an issue with DVDShrink and The Animatrix.

If I go into the "Bonus_Data", "Voices","THE SECOND RENAISSANCE PART 1 BY MAHIRO MAEDA", I get no audio. I discovered that the reason for this is there is only one Japanese audio track on this title (Title 17). It happens to be the same source video as title 8. Title 8 has both AC3/6 EN and AC3/6 JA whereas title 17 is only AC3/2 JA. That part of the bonus data on DVD just uses the same video with different japanese 2Ch. audio (I presume narrative) and an english subtitle.

Now I hope I didn't confuse you too much, but what happens in DVDShrink is if you globally de-select japanese audio, it happens to remove this audio also, which is the only audio track for that title, and therefore the title has no audio. This is not incorrect because one is de-selecting the japanese, but the result is not as expected.

What CloneDVD does (Elby CloneDVD) is if you set your audio preferences to "English" for example, it will set all titles to english if english track is available. But if there is no english track in a title, it will select all the others instead because it does not make a title without audio. This resulted in the CloneDVD backup I did of The Animatrix to retain that Japanese narrative audio for Title 17 even though I did not have Japanese audio set as a preference.

Maybe someone else will understand what my point is

No, not really. I have no trouble selecting only the 6 ch sound track, lvl 3 compression video, extras here and there and I"m done. Maybe some consumers are just too picky. My suggestion? Buy a 2nd copy of the DVD.

DVDShrink is free - what it got to do with being a consumer in this case?

I am not being picky - I am just more curious about DVDShrink and asked some questions, made some observations and am curious if I am doing anything wrong.

Stoner... have you tried doing the Animatrix with DVDShrink? Do you know what I am talking about? I do not want to remove any audio tracks and have found that DVDShrink won't allow this.

Here is another one... Tomb Raider R1

I try Full Disk and have to remove the french audio track and select level 10 before all the red on the bar disappears!

My point is... what if I want to keep all the audio tracks in Full Disk mode - can DVDShrink do this? It seems like it cannot for the few DVD I have tried, and I just suggested that maybe it should offer one or two more compression levels to allow this. Other programs like DVD2One, IC, DVD95COpy and CloneDVD are capable of doing this. I think DVDShrink is much better designed program than most of those, but this one little thing makes it inferior in a way!

Ummm... that's 'cause DVDShrink doesn't compress the audio tracks. Personally, I keep only one track, the track that matters the most. For Japanese anime DVDs, I keep only the original Japanese sound track and only the english subtitle. Examples would be Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke. And as always, I either Still Picture the extras or lvl 8 compress them.

Did I miss something or did you not compress the extras? I'll buy AniMatrix this weekend and try it out. If I can squeeze the original into a DVD-5, then what? I mean what's the point to all this? I need coffee...

hi everybody

Mr shrink has answered some questions and problems about making a whole dvd backup of the animatrix, i guess it should be fixed in release 2.4 or higher

so you can either backup only the episodes in reauthor either wait...aither use the trial of clonedvd to make it...


nb: i use dvdshrink since version 1.3 and all others after..i have to say that it never deceived me (advert)

what i want to say is that any program available on the market if dvdshrink isn't able with it's 10 levels compression then you really should buy the dvd cause if you can reduce its size that much with anything else it will just look like crap IMHO

The above post just made my day.

and you made mine

I hate narrowmindedness when it comes to DVD backup software but to each his own

whatever pleases you is the best program I guess

well just try them all and exept long working rpograms like iC7 and dvd2dvdr tell me what's getting the best quality?

and it wasn't my point to tell that dvdshrink was better it was just reference, to say that whatever prog you use at a certain level all results are BAD