i just bought a dvd burner. so now i have 1 dvd-rom and 1 dvd-rw drive. i would like to be able to copy a dvd on the fly without encoding or ripping to my hard drive.
is this possible?

Depends on the size of the source disk, most DVDs are larger than you can burn, becuase they are Dual-Layer and DVD-/+R are single layer.

If it doesn't exceed the size then it should be possible, just depends on bandwidth/throughput between devices, which could cause buffer underruns.

yes i know about teh dual layer issue. i have a dual layer burner, so i could burn them as well.
i do not know how you would go about copying the dvd though. i am familiar with cdrecord and i got the dvd rw tools. but what do i do now?
also, provideing i may want to rip a dvd take out unwanted tracks (ie widescreen edition) and just burn the neccesary tracks, is tehre software to do this.
in windows i used to use dvd decryptor and someone told me dvd shrink would edit the tracks.
how could i do this in linux?

thanks for the help

Try running DVDShrink in Wine. I haven't tried it myself, but it works great in windows
http://www.dvdshrink.org/what.html

Theres lxdvdrip and dvdbackup you might want to look at.