ArsGeek

Now that we’ve looked at doing various things to multimedia files and burning them to a DVD, let’s examine how to make a copy of a dual layer DVD. If you have a dual layer burner, then there’s no reason to read further. If you’re like me howevever, and you have a single layer (4.7GB) drive and DVDs then this will be a helpful guide.

A note on piracy and legality. Please only use this tutorial to make copies of dual layer discs you have authored yourself, or which fall into some open license scheme. Check with local copyright laws if you must make a copy of licensed material and make sure you’re doing so legally. (sigh)

Now, on to a wonderful tool that I owe much too - xDVDshrink!

Here’s the step by step guide to setting up xDVDShrink on your linux install. I use Ubuntu (6.06), so this guide will be partial to that distro.

1. First things first, we’re going do download xDVDShrink as an RPM, so we’ll need a tool to convert that package into a .deb.

sudo apt-get install alien

Now that we have alien installed, let’s download xDVDShrink. You can get it here. Grab the mdk.noarch.rpm file.

Go to the directory where you saved the rpm and issue the following command:

sudo alien dvd*.rpm

Let it do it’s thing and you should end up with a .deb file in the same directory. Now before we install xDVDShrink, we’ll grab a few things that it’s going to need. You’ll have to have the universe, multiverse and non-free repositories active. To do that, see this tutorial.

sudo apt-get install transcode subtitleripper gocr dvdauthor dvd+rw-tools libdvdcss2 libdvdread3 mkisofs vamps

Now let’s install xDVDShrink:

sudo dpkg -i dvd*.deb

Now we’re going to run the script to set it up. We’ll do this before we go into shiny graphical mode.

sudo dvdshrink

You’ll be asked a number of questions, which are all pretty strait forward. If you’re not sure where your DVD drive is on your system, simply cd to /dev and do an ls for dv* Choose the dvdrw, which in most cases is simply /dev/dvdrw. Once you’ve answered these questions, quit out (CTRL-C).

Got all that? Great! Now on to the DVD magic.

Insert a dual layer disk into your dvdrw drive and type:

sudo xdvdshrink.pl

You can choose whether or not to rip the DVD as a movie, or as Multi-Episode. (i.e. like a tv show). I’ve actually had more success using the Multi-Episode bit, as many DVD’s have more than one item.

I generally click on the “Select from DVD” buttons and let the script figure out what exactly it is I need.

Once you’re done, click the Start Copy button and watch her go!

When done, you’ll have a burnable ISO. xDVDShrink may also be configured to automatically burn your DVD image when you’re finished.

I have not been able to get it to preserve the original menu, which would be fantastic. Please let me know if you’ve got a utility which will do this.

geek out

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