DVD Burning 101 MetaQuestion

March 24, 2008 6:11 AM

How do I back up my movies to DVD-R so I can take the backups to the gym on my portable and prevent my good ones from getting scratched? I just bought a new IMac running Leopard. It has the burner. From research, it looks like I need 1. Mac the Ripper---2.DVD 2toOneX (for compression)---and 3.Roxio Toast to burn (even though there is burning software on my computer).....I have no really good clue and am open to any support and advice you might have to offer. I don't want to buy things that are not so easy to work. I am a very basic computer user. thanks for your time!
posted by snap_dragon to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

What you described should work as far as I know... but you can do it in one step with Fast DVD Copy. The program is wonderful, but only works if you have 15 or 16 Gigs of free hard drive space. That said, I got the program a few years ago (and I'm running tiger, not leopard), so I'm not 100% sure you'll be able to find it, or if it will work when you do. But it's worth a shot.
posted by ndicecco at 7:35 AM on March 24, 2008

DVD Shrink is an older program that's not being developed any more. But it works in most cases to shrink a DVD down to DVD-R size. Don't know how/if it works on a mac.
posted by gjc at 7:37 AM on March 24, 2008

Have you considered not backing up to DVD at all, but instead just ripping your movies to AVIs? Yes, this is what pirates do when they want to distribute movies illegally, but it's also wonderfully handy for the kind of thing you're talking about: turn a movie into a 700MB AVI file and play it straight off your hard drive, no DVD required. It'll also conserve battery life on your portable (playing a DVD sucks battery life like none other).

On a Mac, this is pretty simple: download and install Handbrake. It's simple and free. Then, you can use any number of players to play the resulting AVI file... I prefer VLC, myself. The whole process is actually pretty simple, and for my portable movie-watching needs, I haven't used an actual DVD in years. Good luck!
posted by captainawesome at 7:42 AM on March 24, 2008 [1 favorite]

Handbreak works great for this. I use it for my PDA to watch movies on.
posted by waylaid at 8:14 AM on March 24, 2008

Seconding Handbrake. I use it to rip my DVDs to my iPhone.
posted by neuron at 9:11 AM on March 24, 2008 [1 favorite]

Best answer: depending on the dvd players at the gym, they may support the xvid/divx formats generated by handbrake, but to burn them you will need something like Burn or toast.

You can also replace DVD 2toOneX with Visual Hub, which will produce a .iso file you can burn using Disk Utility to a DVD-R. You can even look into making a 15 hour dvd that will fit on a dvd-r (heavily compressed, but for those small gym lcds you probably wont notice), which means you could fit almost an entire tv season on there.

i'd do mactheripper -> visual hub -> diskutil to burn it.
posted by mrzarquon at 11:32 AM on March 24, 2008 [1 favorite]