DVD Shrink

[slowfox]

Trying to track down a copy of DVD Shrink is actually a little tricky, since it's apparently somewhat less than completely legally to point to it, as a consequence of the fact that it manages to circumvent DVD copy protection, and thereby gives you the opportunity to back up your DVDs to hard disk.

So, in order to find a copy of the installer, you need to google for it. This approach has its problems, not least of which is the risk that rather than ending up with a rather neat, and FREE, DVD backup tool, you could end up with a Trojan Horse that'll wreak havoc upon your system.

Note that I don't preclude the possibility that DVD Shrink could be both. I'm using it, and have used it for years, but that isn't a guarantee that it's perfectly safe.

Anyway, the DVD Shrink site, aside from pointing you towards Google to locate a copy of the installer, also publishes the MD5 Hash Sum for the file you're expecting to download. Hence why we had yesterday's post on how to check MD5 Hash Sums :-).

Assuming, then, that you've managed to locate the installer, and are ready to get up and running, here's how I work with it:

Prepare the ground: create a subdirectory on your hard drive for your rip. If it's a film, then a single folder will be sufficient. If, on the other hand, you've got several episodes on a single disc, then you need to create a separate folder for each episode you're intending to rip.

It's obviously up to you, but I like clear naming conventions, and I try to avoid spaces in my folder/file names. It's also nice to pad early episodes in a series with leading zeroes, so that everything appears in the correct order in a directory listing:




Launch DVD Shrink: You need to select 'Open Disc', which should give you a drop down list of available sources, with the most likely suspect already selected.

Wait: DVD Shrink will then start analysing the DVD you've fed it. There's a little postage-stamp preview window that displays the disc's contents whilst it does this. To make this phase pass a little more quickly, uncheck the ticky box.

At this point, DVD Shrink is just tring to determine what's on the disc, and how it's structured - no (real) data's being written to your hard drive just yet. Once complete, your screen should look like this:




Switch the viewing mode to 'Re-author': Most of the time, a DVD has got more content on it than we're interested in ripping (at least in one go). To isolate the individual elements of the disc, then, we swap modes to 'Re-author', which will then allow us to extract just the elements we want:



DVD Shrink has a good go at trying to guess which bits on the DVD are the important ones, and these tend to be listed on the right under 'Main Movie', with additional material under 'Extras'. In the current example, we can see True Blood S1 episodes 1 and 2.

Drag a single element from the right hand pane into the 'DVD Structure' pane on the left. This is going to be our 're-authored DVD', just a single episode (or, if you were ripping a film, just the film itself):



Note that when you drag content into the 'DVD Structure' pane, the bottom left pane's 'video buttons' also become active, and these allow you to preview the content you've queued up, so that you can verify you've got the correct portion of the disc, if need be.


Backup! Press the 'Backup!' button on the toolbar:

You'll need to ensure that the backup target is set to 'Hard Disk Folder' (probably the default already), and you then need to select the target folder for the output, which will be one of the folders I suggested you set up at the outset (earlier versions of DVD Shrink sometimes tended to trip over their own feet when you tried to create folders on the fly: prepare the ground before you start and everything will be fine).

Finally, make sure that you've got the 'create VIDEO_TS and AUDIO_TS subfolders' ticky box enabled:



At this point, you can press 'OK', and DVD Shrink will start ripping the video data to your hard drive - this can take a while, but you'll get a guesstimate of how long it's going to take, and compared to the marathon process of transcoding (more on that tomorrow), it's actually surprisingly quick.


Once the rip is completed, either delete the current content of the 'DVD Structure' pane in the top left section of the window, and replace it with the next element of the DVD you want to rip, proceeding just as before, or move onto the next DVD in your collection.

Tip: in iterations past, DVD Shrink seemed to take an age to refresh on changing discs. So I got in the habit of closing the application once I'd finished a given DVD, ejecting said DVD from the drive, swapping it for a new one, and only then re-launching DVD Shrink. It's all about speed, and when you're ripping boxed sets, the little moments you can grab here and there all start to make a difference.


At the end of this process, you will end up with a full hard-disk a hard-disk full of DVD rips in unencrypted .VOB format. From here, you can use any number of transcoding tools to convert them into a format of your choice - I'm currently using Badaboom, but have also used Handbrake and Auto Gordian Knot with varying degrees of success.