Many episodic DVDs, Friends, CSI, The West Wing etc may contain Titles (entire episodes) that you simply can’t stand, don’t want or they somehow interfere with a neat backup solution –whatever, this is about combining Titles from different DVDs. Maybe you want to take one Title (episode) from one DVD and three Titles from another DVD and put them onto one DVD-recordable. I’m going to be using The West Wing Season 1 • Episodes 12-22. Disc 4 contains Episodes 12-15 and Disc 5 contains Episodes 16-19. I’m going to combine Episodes 12 & 13 from Disc 4 and Episodes 18 & 19 from Disc 5.

The Two Local Drives Method

This shot shows the discs in their own DVD readers, in the one computer (two DVD-ROMs in this case).



I’ve opened up Disc 4 which shows four Titles (Episodes 12-15)



Click the Re-author button on the Toolbar to open up a Re-author window (Hint: the Start/End Toolbar button is active only in a Re-author window). Expand the “Main Movie” structure on the left hand side and drag over the Titles you require. In this case Episodes 12 & 13, shown as Title 1 and Title 2.



Now I go back to the first window and open the second DVD reader using the “Open Disk” method. The first DVD *must* remain in the first DVD reader!



Drag over the desired Titles (I dragged over Titles 3 & 4 corresponding to Episodes 18 & 19). The next shot shows the four Titles in the Re-author window from two DVD readers.



Now you can Backup without shrinking, Shrink & Rip, or do some Advanced Re-authoring.

The Two Drives with one over the Network Method

This is similar to using two drives on the one computer. Except the shared DVD reader will be accessed using the “Open Files” tool. Create a share on the other computer’s DVD drive



Click on Open Files and navigate to “Ripper” (and its VIDEO_TS folder).



Locate and select the VIDEO_TS.IFO file and click “Open”.



If you see this error it means that DVD Shrink cannot decrypt over your network (I’m not sure it can anyway, by itself).



To enable DVD Shrink to read the shared DVD, you can enable AnyDVD on the other computer to do the decrypting (de-CSS) – now ain’t that clever; I don’t think there’s another tool that’ll do it Now just continue from the “The Two Local Drives Method” above

The One DVD Drive and Hard-drive Files Method

This is not as difficult as it seems, just a little fiddly and maybe ‘time-consuming’ to some. The trick is to rip one of the DVDs to hard-drive first. Here’s the ‘thing’ though – only rip the Titles you want – saves time and space. Open the DVD by clicking “Open Disk” on the Toolbar and click “Re-author” to open another window. The beauty of my two-Title rip to hard-drive is that there’s no compression.



Click “Backup!” and navigate to your target directory; I’m also choosing Deep Analysis (DA) at this point. (These two Titles/Episodes took less than 20 minutes for DA and much less to rip).



Click “OK” when it’s done ripping the first two Titles to the hard-drive. Because Re-author = no menus, I will need to drop the Episodes in the order I want to play them. Click “Open Files” and navigate to the VIDEO_TS.IFO file of the previously ripped Titles.



Here’s my two-Title hard-drive rip



Now all you do is drag these Titles over to the Re-author window. Now open the other DVD in the DVD reader. Drag the Titles you need from this window to the Re-author window. All you have left to do is select the level of compression for each Title, the Video, Audio and Subpicture Streams you want to keep and click “Backup!”

Good luck. Got problems? Then post here