There is an excellent program available for the Windows world called DVDShrink. It allows you to edit the structure of the disc (e.g. keeping one title but not another--useful for removing menus), and it has a "compression" feature to fit the movie in 4.7GB (although I must admit I don't know what that does, technically). While I realize I will probably not get the ease of use that that program offers, I was wondering what is available in the area of ripping DVD-Video discs to recordable DVDs in Linux. All the guides and software I can find deal with ripping and then transcoding a movie in some way to fit it on a blank CD, a process I always found horrendous. Now that I have DVD burners available to me, I'd like to rip movies onto blank DVDs. Suggestions, anyone?

N.B. I've tried using Wine--I don't think it likes my USB DVD+RW drive. Lots of messages about unsupported ioctls. I'd rather use open-source software anyway, if possible.

Useful info: http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=7174

Check out the Dec 2003 issue of Linux Journal -- J.W.

i don't think there is any yet. dvdshrink will run under crossover office. then you can burn your iso image with cdrecord or whatever you use. there's a long thread on it on this site. search for dvdshrink here.

Thanks, whansard.

I found the thread. It was very informative. I guess my question now is do I have to use dvdbackup with DVDShrink (which I don't really mind doing) or can I use its "Open Disc" button (thereby accessing the disc directly)? That isn't working right now but if someone else has gotten it to I'll keep trying.

you can't use the open disk, but you can use open files, and have the disk mounted. i had mixed success with that in that other thread.

I was having mixed success as well...it would occasionally crash when analyzing the video. That could have been due to low disk space though. Have you been able to use the "Open..." feature on the file menu to select a folder or have you had to specify from the command line? When I click open, I get a directory selection box with a root entry "Desktop". It won't expand and there are messages printed to the console about unimplemented functions. Oh, well. I'm thinking I'm going to have to go for VMWare or something, 'cause there are several Windows apps that I need/want.

the unimplemented functions stuff is normal. i have only been using open and select files. i get my computer under desktop, and then all the drives in my config. win4lin is an option too, besides vmware.