Tuesday, January 09, 2007

Mac X: Making backup of your dvd movie

Sometimes people buy dvd movies, for AU$30-40 and of course they would like to make a copy of it, because it wouldn't be nice to destroy original disks.

Windows users don't have problems with that, because there exists great free tool to do it called DVD Shirnk. I used it to make backup of my collection of Star Wars movies, and it is really worth of recommending.

But what about Mac X users? At the moment I want to backup one freshly bought movie, and unfortunately on Mac X this task is not so trivial. First of all, there is no free tool (at least I could not find any) to do this. Of course there are many commercial software that can be helpful, but I do not what to spend money, on software that is used really rarely.

Therefore, what I do is, I use two tools to make backups. First, I use free MacTheRipper (A DVD extractor) to dump movie to hard drive. It must be noted, that MacTheRipper do not compress (shrink) movies; thus, if your move is bigger that 4.37GB, you have to use another tool, to shirk it, after it was copied to hard drive.

To shrink movie, you can use: Popcorn, DVD2OneX, DVDRemaster or Toast Titanium. Luckily for me, I owe the last program. Therefore, I can burn shirked movie to DVD5.

Nevertheless, this workaround solution is not as good as the one using DVD Shrink on Windows. First and foremost, you cannot choose what parts of DVD you want to extract like which languages, sound, subtitles, extra features etc. MacTheRipper gives you opportunity mainly to dump main movie only, all full dvd. You cannot select that you want e.g. English subtitles only or/and Polish ones.

But, for now I do not see any great alternative for me in the task of backuping dvd movies on Mac X.

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