How to Make Backup Copies of Your Movie DVDs

It's usually just a matter of time before a DVD movie disc gets scratched and becomes unreadable in a DVD player. Thats why it's a good idea to back up your DVDs so you no longer have to worry about the possibility of damaging your precious DVD collection. A really simple way to a make a back up copy is by using the freeware application called DVD Shrink. DVD Shrink is able to compress standard dual-layer DVDs down to a size that will fit on to a single-layer DVD disc, and it's also able to decrypt encrypted DVDs.

Here's what you'll need to back up your DVDs:
- DVD-RW drive
- DVD Shrink freeware (www.dvdshrink.org) 
- A blank DVD-R disc
- The DVD that you want to copy

Once you've got DVD Shrink installed on your computer and have inserted a DVD that you would like to copy, start up DVD Shrink.

1. Click Open Disc on the Toolbar.
2. Now Select the DVD drive where the DVD you want to copy is located, and click OK. (The E:\ drive is my DVD drive). See Figure 1.
3. DVD Shrink will now begin analyzing the DVDs contents to determine whether or not the movie is encrypted, and catalog the contents of the disc. If you encounter the following error "DVD Shrink encountered an error and cannot continue," you will need to use a separate program such as DVD Fab Decrypter to get the files off the DVD disc.
4. After DVD Shrink has finished analyzing the disc, you will be able to see the various audio and video streams on the disc and its suggested level of compression. If the DVD contains things like, coming attractions, bonus footage, and other settings, DVD Shrink will most likely have to compress the audio and video to fit it on a DVD-R. To improve the quality of the main movie, uncheck any audio or video streams from the Main Movie folder that you don't need, such as French Audio or Spanish Audio Subpicture, as well as any Titles from the Extras folder.  (Note I've made a backup copy of a DVD with the video compression percentage at around 36% and I was still pretty happy with the end result, but to get the best quality video you will want to make sure that the compression setting is as close to 100% as possible.)
5. Click Backup! on the Toolbar.
6. A box will pop-up called "Backup DVD". With Target Device tab selected, click on the Browse... button to tell DVD Shrink where to save the DVD files to. (I'm going to save the files to a folder called "DVD Backup" on my F:\ drive.)  Make sure you've checked Create VIDEO_TS and AUDIO_TS subfolders and then click OK.
7. DVD Shrink will begin ripping the contents of your DVD to the folder you choose on your hard drive. The encoding process typically takes around 20 minutes to complete, but this will ultimately depend on the speed of your computer and DVD drive.
8. You've now finished backing up your DVD movie to your hard drive. It's now time to make a DVD-R backup copy.
9. Open up your DVD burner application. (I'm using SONIC RecordNow!)
10. Tell it you want to create a DVD data disc and make sure you've selected your DVD-RW drive.
11. Now Add the AUDIO_TS and VIDEO_TS folders.
12. Insert a blank DVD-R or DVD-RW disc into your DVD burning drive and click Burn.

You have now made a backup copy of your DVD movie. See it wasn't that hard after all was it!

Keep in mind that DVD Shrink is no longer under development, but you can still find a free copy of the latest version online. To find it, do a search for "DVD Shrink 3.2.0.15" in Google or Yahoo.