I was wondering if it is possible to make playable DVD's if I just burn half of the VOB files on one dvd-r (single layer) and the rest of the files on the second DVD-r? That way I will have backed up the movie on 2 DVD-r and wont have to compress them to 1 DVD5?

Thanks

Thanks all, I installed transcoder (phew!) and I am using that to reduce the file size. It's crazy how many dependencies there are for Suse 9.2.. I am shrinking the files right now

I tried to do this in the shell: mplex -f 8 -o final.mpg shrinked.m2v movie.ac3
It gives me this error =>
**ERROR: [mplex] Need to split output but there appears to be no %d in the filename pattern final.mpg

So, I thought putting a %d in final like this would help: mplex -f 8 -o final%d.mpg shrinked.m2v movie.ac3
It worked for a while and then gave me this error ==>
**ERROR: [mplex] Too many frame drops -exiting
Could someone tell me how to fix this? I am almost done authoring this DVD.. need some help

Thanks

You could use dvdshrink under wine......
or look here

http://www.bunkus.org/dvdripping4lin....html#software
link might be somewhat dated but I think it has basic transcoding under linux..

You can't use dvdshrink to shrink files from your hard drive as you cant open them. I am using dvd9 to dvd5 guide from this site and I am more than half way through. I was successful in shrinking the dvd using transcoder.. I just need to multiplex it back with the audio and thats where I am having a problem. Is there any other tool (other thn mplex) that I can use to multiplex the files? Or if someone could tell me how to fix the problem?

Thanks in advance

I ended up using tcmplex to multiplex the files.. it works fine but the only problem I have is that the audio and video are out of sync in the resulting vob file.. does anyone have an idea about how to fix that?

Thanks

You can do that (although I wonder why).
You could exctract the vob files with a program called "vobcopy".
Then put them in two separate directories, taking care each directory size cat fit 4.7 gigs size.
then using a program called "dvdauthor" create two separete template from the directories you created.
This set up two different VIDEO_TS.IFO (one each directory) files necessary to make playable DVDs.
Create two ISO images and burn them with you favourite DVD burning program.
Let me suggest you using "dvdstream". It creates a slighty compressed DVD template, with a very good quality on a single disk.
Hope this helps
Ciao

That information is so helpful. I looked for information on how to make 2 dvd-r's from a DVD9 disk but couldnt find easy informatio anywhere. I finally figured out how to use dvdshrink on my system and used that to shrink the dvdsize. I will definately give this a try the next time I need to do something like that as that way I could preserve the quality of the movie.

Thanks again.