Burned my first DVD this morning
June 19, 2005So last week the laptop I ordered from Best Buy arrived. It’s an HP Pavillion, one of the models they customize for various retailers based on the dv1000 platform. Only got a Celeron, but the specs are excellent for an $850 laptop–512 MB RAM, 60 GB hard drive, and a DVD+/-R & RW drive. All of this would have cost me twice as much in a Mac laptop, and given Apple’s recent news I figured there’s no point waiting to buy a PowerBook.
Anyway, the DVD recorder is what I’ve been wanting and this model gives it to me cheap. And when I went to pick it up at Best Buy they happened to have a closeout on some DVD+R discs, a five pack with cases for $2.99. So I picked those up and this morning I finally got around to using them.
No I wasn’t ripping off some random disc, I was just making a back-up copy of a movie I already own. Mostly I wanted to get rid of the FBI warning and all the other crap they make you sit thru at the beginning of the disc. I just want the movie to start right in.
So I used the infamous DVD Decrypter (yes it can still be found for download, search the usual suspects and you’ll find it) to rip my DVD onto the hard drive. Then I used DVD Shrink to get rid of the menus and crap I didn’t want. I also used it to do the compression (it’s a double-layer original so even with the junk cut out it was still too big to fit onto one DVD+R) and build the ISO image. Then back to DVD Decrypter to burn the ISO onto the disc.
It all worked like a charm–my backup copy works just fine on my DVD players, and the movie starts right up without making you sit thru the FBI warnings and menus. Rather amazing how easy it all was–I started the process not really knowing what I would need to do beyond finding a copy of DVD Decrypter. But from there, with a little help from Google, I was able to find DVD Shrink and figure out the exact steps I would need to follow to accomplish my goal. All in just a couple hours hacking this morning.
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