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I hate my video being locked into one player, so personally I wish qt would just die.

me too.

actually all my encoding hassles solved when i got dvd-/+ burner. now if movie would fit on dvd+-r i use DVD Shrink and if i need to compress it i use DVD2one. fantastic speed and 1:1 quality (if movie fits without recompression). no more 16 hour encoding on my p2-350. 30 minutes and all done. no glitches with 3:2 pulldown (most ripping tools has problems with that), problems with aspect ratio, audio sync... and plays on all standalone dvd players.

I have slightly better luck with PowerDVD for the player, but keep Zoomplayer, WinDVD and PowerDVD on the machine (Shuttle cube in living room with built in S-Video output) for unique circumstances.

Oh, since I haven't seen anyone mention it yet, 100 Mbits/sec ethernet is just fine for any movie operating through either a hub or switch. 10Mbits/sec can do only if the movie is compressed to 3.5GB or less, otherwise you get freezeframes and droppouts on occasion. Tried 802.11b, but it just plain wasn't watchable. I'd like to try 802.11g and see if there is an improvement.

Great idea (since I've been doing it for about 3 years already), but I surely wonder how this made it to the Slashdot front page. This is hardly new, nor difficult to execute.

Russian subtitles was an example. I realize they do not take up much space. But there's all sorts of other stuff you can remove, including commentary, special features, etc.

Oh, and removing that junk is optional, anyway. The application compresses DVDs into half the space anyway. The whole point is to fit a double-layer production disk onto a single layer consumer disk.

Odds are you could use DVD Shrink to cut that size in half, or more, since you could removed the Russian subtitles and other stuff you probably don't need ... :)

DVD Shrink. Rip your movies to the hard drive, and then burn them with Nero or some other DVD burnin software. DVD Shrink is free and works great. It is Windows however.

I think the next time I have to re-activate DVDXcopy because I've upgraded my hardware (again), I'm just going to "activate it myself".

Why bother paying for what you can get for free? DVD Decrypter, DVDStripper, and DVD Shrink will edit out unwanted material and squeeze any movie down to where it'll fit on a DVD-R, and they're all free (as in beer, anyway, which is more than you can say for DVDXcopy).

Actually it's already very easy to make 'near perfect' backups of DVDs onto an ordinary single layer DVD-R. Most of the well known tools are all Windows based, but I think I recall seing an Open Source project to do the same thing under Linux.

Some well known examples are (the freeware) DVDShrink, and DVD2One.

They actually do a surprisingly good job of it too, especially since you can just backup the main movie (without unnecessary extra features/soundtracks) and very often squeeze a movie on without having to do much (if any) re-encoding.

DVD Shrink can reencode or reauthor a DVD in like 25 minutes on a decent PC. 15 minutes to burn at 4x on a $.70 disc.

Net cost to me: $1.50 for the rental, $.70 for the disc. Amortizing the DVD burner over, say, 100 discs, call that $2...

Wow. $3.20 and an hour's time.

I guess I'll use the other 5 hours to do five more discs.

If it's a 4.35GB disc, I just use DVDDecryptor. If it's larger, there are a number of things you can try.

DVDShrink allows you to shrink any given video stream on the disc and strip out some audio streams. Sometimes you can compress the extras on a disc enough so that the main movie isn't compressed at all, yet the entire DVD (including structure) still fits on one DVD-R. Failing that, you can pick and choose Titles (basically video streams) to use, but then you lose the disc structure, menus, etc. You can also compress the main movie a bit within DVDShrink, and this is almost always enough to get my backup (most of the extras I don't care about; just deleted scenes and on /some/ discs I like behind the scenes featurettes.)

If you want to keep the structure and you have some time to kill, you can reencode the DVD. DoItFastForYou, ReAuthorist, and DoCCE4You is a suite of programs designed to make this as easy as possible, but you need access to some high-dollar software (CinemaCraft Encoder, for one) are required, though. The suite can even export the output as a Sonic Scenarist (DVD Authoring software) project, however again, Scenarist is quite expensive. Information about all of the above is available at http://www.doom.net.

Finally, you can keep the structure of the DVD but delete any titles you don't want by inserting a 1 second blank clip in place of that video stream. However you really need to know the IFO structure in order to do this, and use IFOEdit (available at the above URL.)

Such software exists for free as well. People need only be informed of it.

Well... if you dont have a DeCSSing DVD player, your movies wont play.

These DVD's are like any other:

1) use DVD decrypter (free) to rip
2) use DVDshrink (free) to transcode to DVD5 size
3) use Nero/etc/whatever to burn a UDF disk on a DVD-R

voila.. a copy of about any DVD, with 47 hours left before it rusts

And it's awesome! DVDshrink allows you to set the compression levels on every single extra/menu/video stream individually.

It's fast like DVD2ONE...

Guide to DVDshrink