I've spent a bunch of time looking for this solution over the last few days, so hopefully this isn't waisting anyones time. I want to backup some of my DVD movies on regular 4.7 DVD-R discs. I'm not interested in compressing them, but I am willing to pull out the menus and extra features to get them to fit (I know this rules out many movies). These are movies that I own, before anyone asks :-) I'm 90% there, but stuck. Here is what I'm doing...

*"vobcopy -m" to pull the DVD contents to hard drive (using libdvdcss and libdvdread)
*play the .vob files to find the ones that contain the main movie
*dvdauthor -o movie *.vob (on just the files that I want)

This is where I'm stuck, dvdauthor replies:
"ERR: SCR moves backwards, remultiplex input."

Do I really need to pull out the M2V and AC3 files out, multiplex to MPEG and burn that? Why would this be necessary if these segments are direct from DVD, and I'm not compressing?

Is there an easier solution that I'm not finding?

Thanks in advance! ...Steve

I certainly am not an expert, but have had very good luck with K9Copy. It is a GUI program that allows you to backup files to your Hard Drive as an ISO, will compress DVD9 to DVD5 and burn them to DVDs and does it without the use of another program. It will also take ISOs and burn them to DVDs.

Go and get it and the other files it needs at

http://packman.links2linux.org

Just search for K9Copy.

Good Luck!

Thanks for the reply! I did try k9Copy, but didn't have much luck. I can pull an ISO no problem, but most will be too large to burn on a 4.7G disc. That's why I was going down the vobcopy, dvdauthor, mkisofs, growisofs path. This would allow me to pull out the extras that I don't care about, and create a new ISO to burn.

After you open K9Copy, you will see DVD and Settings, click Settings and you can set the size of the file, K9Copy will "Shrink" the file to that size. I have only Auto burn checked and it will make a Backup/copy of a commercial DVD, shrink it to DVD5 size and burn it in one operation.

Make sure that you have dvdauthor and vamps also installed.

Good Luck again.

PS What linux version are you running?

I have a similar question.

I'm using vobcopy with the -m option. I do vobcopy /mnt/cdlocation/directoryofvobfiles/* so I get everything, I guess.

So I can happily watch most movies and most features with something like
xine -f -u 1 *.VOB

the -f is for fullscreen and the -u 1 is for subtitles. Sometimes I need to use kaffeine similarly.

But how do I reverse the process and take these files and put them on a DVD so that it plays a movie?

k9copy didn't install well for me, in SUSE 10.1.

Another program, perhaps called vobbackup or dvdbackup, worked ok on my first test, but I forgot the right syntax!

But vobcopy works like a champ for me.

Not sure if it exactly what your looking for, but to rip DVDs I use acidrip. It uses mplayers encoders to convert to mpg or avi and has more options than you can shake a stick at. K3b also has video encoding built in, I think it is avi too though. A wrapper format, mkv, would keep your language and subtitle options. After looking at the results, its impressive. I'm not sure if any rippers/encoders for linux use it yet though.