Before we jump into the recipe that I use to backup my favorite DVDs, let’s look into the ingredients necessary to make this a winning solution. You will need the following pieces for this article:

1. DVD burner – of course all of this would be moot without a good DVD burner on hand. There are so many brands to choose from but you definitely can not go wrong with a regular Pioneer DVD-R burner or especially their dual format burner starting with the DVR-106.
2. Nero 6 (or 5.5.x) software application – burning software to burn the new DVD. This is the only software you’ll need to purchase for this story. There are other software applications that you can use in lieu of Nero also.
3. DVD Shrink 3.0 Beta 5 or later – this is a great tool to rip and reencode the DVD if necessary
4. DVD+-R/RW blank media – blank media is getting cheaper and cheaper by the month. You can easily get good DVD+-R 4x media for around or under a $1.00 a disc nowadays.

Before we go any further, it’s important to talk about a problem with commercial DVDs. Most commercial DVDs use dual layered DVDs that are known as DVD9 discs. These discs store roughly 8.5 GB of data and are far larger than the standard 4.7GB DVD (known as DVD5) blanks available for consumers today. Why are these discs in use you might ask? Well easy – most movie DVDs have not only the movie but extra features and multiple sound tracks. All this information needs space and thus the regular DVD5 spec is just too small for the purposes of a standard movie nowadays. So of course the problem is – how do you get a DVD9 disc to fit onto a DVD5 disc?
There are a couple of solutions that are currently available to consumers with DVD burners and DVD copying software:

1. You can copy only the movie portion of the DVD and not copy the menu and extra features normally found on current commercial DVDs. The movie alone will usually fit onto one DVD5 disc though this isn’t always the case. You may still need to reencode the movie to force it to fit (downsample) onto a DVD5 disc.
2. You can split the DVD9 disc into two DVD5 discs and create a perfect copy (albeit across two discs). This will force you to swap discs in the middle of the movie but you’re guaranteed to get the exact backup. Applications such as DVDXCopy perform this feature.
3. You can force the DVD9 to fit onto a DVD5 disc by compressing the MPEG2 video streams further which will degrade the quality of the movie but will give you everything that you will need. This is probably the most time consuming method since your system will more than likely need to reencode the MPEG2 video stream. It’s best if you have a high end system to perform this or do it at night before you head to bed if you have an older system.