Making a DVD on a Budget:

I'm in the process of writing a more in-depth article on this subject so hopefully it will be up soon. In the meantime, I wanted to offer some thoughts on this subject. When I bought my first CD burner (a long time ago!) was amazed at how easy it was to create backups of my CD collection to take in the car. Advances in burning technology also came quickly.

When I got my first DVD burner, I expected the same. Perhaps a few hang-ups over recognized the burner hardware and some glitchy-ness when copy protection causes me issues with legally backing up my own stuff. What I was surprised to find is that it was much more complicated than that. I had trouble finding good software to do the job efficiently. I had some luck with some commercial programs like Nero and CloneDVD but after the trials ran out I hadn't had so much success that I was sure it was worth buying them. My knowledge about DVD's was rudimentary and I had trouble figuring out why a DVD could appear to hold three times as much as data as a burnable DVD would hold! Anyway, I ended up going through quite a bit of trial and error to find a process that I've finally become fairly happy with. Not only that, but I found a process that requires only freely available software.

In a nutshell, for those of you who just want to poke around, try downloading two very nice utilities. The first is DVD Shrink, which is just a wonderful program. It will read your disc and shows you what is on the disc including divisions between menus, the full movie, extra features, and so on. Then it lets you customize what you want to do with your backup. For space or quality you can choose to leave out portions of the original DVD. DVD Shrink will also compress the output file(s) for you so they will fit on your DVD R. The second utility that I use is called "ImgBurn" and I use it after I've used DVD Shrink to store my movie as an .ISO on my drive. ImgBurn can be set to burn at different speeds and does a fantastic job. Using these utilities along with high-quality DVD's (not just the cheap coasters you can buy on sale) I've had very good luck with this method. As soon as I have time to finish the full article on this I will put a link here as well. If you need extra info on this topic, check out these books on Backing Up Your DVD. Happy burning!