I love ripping movies with My Movies and AnyDVD. Its such a great simple and streamlined way of ripping and tagging. I have a problme with the 1:1 copy though. I have 1TB of harddrive space and I am now out of space with only 100 movies ripped. We have a collection of about 250 movies. I really care about movie quality but at the same time cant afford another TB of space. What are some of the ways others are ripping with compression? I am looking for as little loss of quality as possible. Is there a happy medium out there?

Clonedvd will amaze you to really be honest or dvd shrink.

sincityharley,
In my opinion, any level of compression = loss of quality. For me, there is no "happy medium". The degree of opinioned quality loss varies from poster to poster based on their playback equiptment i.e. HD playback or just simple composite cables connected to a regular TV. I never compress ... ever.

If you want full quality, why don't you buy another 1TB drive? You say you can't afford it but it is the only solution for the quality conscious person that you seem to be. That is if you insist on using the HDD storage method. And then buy another drive when that one fills up. You could use removable HDD mounts to switch drives. Keep an index of which movies are on which drive.

Longevity is an issue too. HDD's fail eventually. The spindle bearings wear out ... and you are putting constant wear on the bearings by playing movies off the HDD instead of a regular DVD player.

I prefer a DVD writable disk backup rather than storing my movies on a HDD. But even the best quality DVD writable disks may fail in 10-20 years. Storage conditions matter.

Best regards,
Whisperer

If you only care about the main movie and not the extras and menus, you can use one of several tools (e.g. DVD Shrink) that let you either remove stuff or only keep the main movie, such tools can also remove audio tracks that don't interest you.

This will often significantly reduce the size of the movie without using any compression at all.

well... there would still be compression, but why dont you convert it into a ratdvd file? then you would have more space on your hd.

haveacigar,
But isn't making a ratdvd file just another "lossy" form of compression? Doesn't it throw away data (image data) to make files smaller? One should never compress image data, only large text & other types of data files. You can never regain the loss. Which would just be another method of loosing quality. All "lossy" methods sacrifice quality. And it wouldn't even do compression of movies in a "smart" way such as CloneDVD or other backup software by first choosing to throw away data from the "denser" part of the movie image like the black shadow areas.

If a ratdvd file is not lossy process of compression, then it would not be able to gain more than 10-15% space savings by utilizing drive storage clusters better ... which won't help sincityharley much!

Whisperer

You can set DVD Shrink to not compress the video!
I presume the same can be done for many other such tools.

If you want the best quality when compressing DVDs why not try DVD-Rebuilder. I use either HCenc or Autoqmatic encoders but feel free to try others.

You can do MUCH more with the pro version (a must buy like AnyDVD) but the freeware version should suit you fine if you just want to compress.

DVD-Rebuilder

DVD Shrink is the one I have the best experiece for not shrinking or with minimum shrinking to keep the qulity of burn DVD at Max.

umm... yes... but didnt he say that he wanted to fit more movies onto his hd?.. if dvd shrink was set not to compress the video he would be in exactly the same situation...

[edit] i was under the impression you just wanted to play the movies off of your computer... but if im wrong, and you still want to burn them, you could compress the iso images with a program like winrar or winzip, however you would have to extract the file...

Ermm, no!

Please read my suggestion again (parts emphasized for clarity):
The output from DVD Shrink can either be a complete ISO image of the "shrinked" disc, or a directory containing the same VOB and IFO files.

ah.. er... yes

if you use dvd shrink, in addition to DrageMester's suggestions, you can use the trim tool to trim extended title sequences or credits...a few MB here and there can add up.

Have you thought of using a compressor like DivX or XviD. Maybe you have a better eye than I do but I cannot tell any difference between a DivX or XviD movie compressed to a 3:1 ratio and the original. I use AnyDVD as my ripper then use a program like avi.net, Divx Dr or Staxrip to compress the movie. I just set the quality at a quantizer of 4, single pass, but the real perfectionist will use quantizers of 3 which will give you about a 3:1 compression.

Of course you will now need a media player that will play the movie and for that I would recommend "Media Player Classic" or "VCL Player".

If you want maximum quality, don't go with a transcoder (DVD Shrink and the like). Encoders give out the best quality. Try it out.

I would honestly use CloneDVD to remove parts of the DVD you don't need, like extras and audio tracks. This has already been suggested. However, I would ALSO go through the 1TB you already have and redo those with this method. The space savings you'd get back would be enormous. Didn't see anyone mention that, so I thought I would. However, I'm with Whisperer on this one....dual layer backups are truly the way to go.

Can you enlighten me on various ways to have a near dvd picture without using a dual layer media with the dvd tools. I been using anydvd with clonedvd2. I been hearing thsi program is better than this one etc... Its like ford vs. pontaic vs. chevy. I mainly just want the movie with dolby digital sound and/or with dts audio. I want to try something new and thought you as a main person could help me out. I wouldnt mind trying something out.

Regards

For doing a SL backup it really depends heavily on the source DVD. Some movies just CAN NOT be done without compression, which automatically means you lose some quality. Now, the question is...how much loss is too much? This is literally the most subjective concept in DVD backups. YOU have to be the one to answer that. In any case, you want to use the Copy DVD Titles button which will select the main movie. Then you want to make sure you only select ONE language....realize that DTS will take up more space than AC3, but, always select 6 channel AC3 otherwise you may get the director's commentary. This will give you the best possible results with CloneDVD. Again, though, you have to decide what the acceptable level of compression is going to be.

Now what about nero, 1click pro, and some expensive encoders.... Obviously this is NOT a big deal to me, cus if it was I would just like to use dual layer media @ 2 bucks. But all I really do is just copy the main movie. I would like to see what u would recommend as a better choice?

I have no experience at all with 1click pro, but, I know some people really like it. My advice, as always, is to try them out and see how they look to you. Remember, we can argue technicalities all day about what is the best, but, at the end of the day, YOU are the one that has to watch the results. It's VERY subjective as to what people consider the best. I know a lot of people really like DVD Shrink with Deep Analysis mode. I'm not a huge fan myself, but, you can't argue with the results...they are pretty darn good. I myself use DVD-RB with CCE basic on occasion, however I've not used this method in quite a few months. I invested some money in a bunch of DL media so I don't bother with heavy compression anymore. I just don't see a need. Nero, btw, is essentially DVD Shrink as Recode was made by the same author. Anyway, just give them a try and see what the results look like. Lately I've been sticking with CloneDVD for both my SL and DL backup needs. Haven't been disappointed yet.