I just bought Munich and after reading the back cover it says it is 164 minutes. Should I backup it up onto 1 or 2 discs? I'll be doing movie only with Anydvd and Clonedvd2.

If you want to do no compression, the best solutions are two:

1) burn on two single layer discs, or
2) burn on a dual layer disc.

I suggest you to do a simple test: Load the movie on clonedvd and do the extreme compression required to fill on a single layer disc.

Then burn resulting files on a rewritable media, and watch result on your TV. If you see that quality is good, then burn a definitive copy on a normal disc.

Obviously, your standalone must be able to read rewritable media.

If results are not good, then split the movie and burn each part on a separate disc.

@ taylor30,

Depending on the particular viewing hardware (Television) used any more than 80% CloneDVD transcoding compression will be noticeable.

Best Regards,
bjkg

The compression is 59%

Some TV don't show many differences, and a not picky eye don't note subtile differences.

Do a test and decide by yourself if quality drop is too much for your TV/eyes. There is a lot of subjectivity in this stuff. Some people see details that other don't note at all.

There's no simple answer to your question. It depends on the size and quality of the TV, the quality of the DVD player, and how picky you are about quality. If you have a fairly small TV you might not notice a significant difference from the original. However, at 40% compression I would suggest using DVDShrink with Deep Analysis and Maximum Smoothness. It will produce results better than CloneDVD2. You can run it through CloneDVD2 first in DVD+/-R DL mode to remove any extras, trailers, and studio logos so you maximize the available space.

I backed up Battlestar Galactica Season 1 and 2.0 using DVDShrink with Deep Analysis and Maximum Smoothness AEC. While there was definite detail loss and a lot of grain/spotting when viewed on my LCD monitor, I didn't notice much of a difference on my 27" TV. There was a slight loss of detail but I couldn't tell that there was any more grain.

To give you a point of reference, a movie at 40-45% compression (which is very severe) in DVD Shrink will provide quality which exceeds that of a divx rip of a movie on 2 CDs (1400 MB) in terms of quality and detail. If you don't mind the quality of such a divx rip, or have ever viewed on one your TV and found it acceptable, you shouldn't have a problem with DVDShrink or CloneDVD2 at high compression.

BTW, when I say 40% compression, I mean you're compressing the DVD to 60% of the original size.

taylor30, did you burn a rewritable with the 59% version? How did it look on your TV?

Just thought I'd chime in here since I backed this up awhile ago using DvdReMake Pro, DVD-Rebuilder & Cinema Craft Encoder SP. The disc right off the bat has a considerable amount of grain added to the video, I for one don't remember viewing it this way when I saw it in theaters but I guess this effect is added to all Spielberg films after Minority Report. It's a pretty long movie to begin with so you'll get an average bitrate 3205 Kbps, should you decide movie and menus as well as keeping the ENG 5.1 track. On CRTs the film looks fine to my eyes as in certain scenes it appears to be soft due to the hue used in the film during daylight scenes but once you place this disc on a 52" HDTV DLP then you'll notice where the faults in the source (DVD9) and compressed DVD5 disc. If your TV set is smaller than 36" then go on right ahead and compress the disc to a single layer DVD, it won't look bad but then again the disc doesn't look that great to begin with. Just be sure to remove the extras, such as introduction by director, French 5.1 & descriptive video service 2.0.

I have this dvd so I did a "quick" test.
Given the amount of additional compression needed to fit it on a single layer dvd media, I did not even bother trying CloneDVD2.
However, if I select only the movie title along with only the english DD5.1 soundtrack and english subtitles in DVDShrink/Re-Author mode, run deep analysis and then encode it and burn from those files - the resulting dvd is quite good. DVDShrink will crank for a while, but the transcoding results are well worth it.