Backing up your DVDs with DVD Shrink

Let me start by telling you that I do NOT condone DVD piracy. I have never downloaded a movie off the internet and to be honest, don't even know where to. I have a collection of hundreds of DVD's which are for the most part legitimately purchased. I like to own the real thing if I am going to own it at all, otherwise I can just rent it from QuickFlix.

That said, there is a great tool for backing up your DVDs, called DVD Shrink, and best of all its free. There is a commercial product by the same name now (and of similar functionality) which you can pay for, but it is a different application.

DVD Shrink allows you to create ISO disk images from your DVDs to save on your hard disc. Used in conjunction with Nero, it also allows you to burn your backups to DVD. It also bypasses copyright encryptions which would normally prevent you making backup copies of movies.

It also overcomes another problem. Most commercial DVDs are recorded onto dual-layer DVDs, which hold more data than the usual blank 'single-layer' DVDs. Blank dual-layer DVDs are considerably more expensive. However, DVD Shrink provides compression algorithms which allow you to shrink down the size of your movies to fit on a single-layer disk, with negligable loss in quality. It also allows you to remove extra information from your disc image, such as added features or foreign language options, in order to save space.

OK, so it bypasses copyrights on your DVDs and makes it easy to burn copies to a blank disk. So what makes it useful for anything but DVD piracy?

For me, personally, I get the most use out of it as something to help preserve my DVD collection. With so many DVDs, I have many friends who want to borrow movies from me all the time. I love sharing my favourite movies with friends to watch. However, the more popular ones can undergo a fair bit of wear-and-tear from handling, or even if borrowed by one careless friend who loses or damages it. So often, depending on the DVD, I will make a backup to my hard disk in case it doesn't come back in good shape. My friends are good to me, and if they did damage or lost one of my DVDs, they would be only too happy to replace it, but many of the independant or international films are near impossible to replace easily. Backing up DVDs gives me peace of mind.

Sometimes instead, I will make a copy to loan to the friend instead. This means that the original can't get lost or scratched, and for those who don't have multizone DVD players they can watch my DVDs that don't have DVD region of 4, such as most of my imported collection.

Maybe this qualifies as piracy, but I think it no worse than ripping your CDs to your computer or MP3 player, and I am not burning copies for general distribution.

You can find out more information about DVD Shrink at http://www.dvdshrink.info/

You can also download it from here or google 'DVD Shrink' for other sources.

Do not confuse this with DVD Shrink 2008 which is a different product and NOT free.