Free and helpful Application to backup and Copy DVDs

[johnoo8712]

Feel frustrated when you are trying to copy your favorites DVDs to hard disk on your PC? All genuine DVDs are encrypted with Content Scrambling System or simply called CSS protection. Want to enjoy the movie in a more free way? I would like to share a helpful and powerful freeware with you, DVD Shrink. If you want not only the DVD video back up, but also have the need to convert the DVD to AVI, MPEG, WMV, 3GP etc, you also need a video converter.
DVD Shrink is a freeware DVD transcoder for Microsoft Windows which facilitates decrypting and backing up DVD movies, and can automatically re-compress video, to as little as 39% of its original size, depending on the aspect ratio of the original DVD (with a corresponding loss in quality) to allow it to fit on a standard DVD±R (W), a Dual-Layer DVD+R, or any user-defined custom size.
Featuring a decryption algorithm, DVD Shrink is able to remove the CSS copy protection, User operation prohibition, and also allows the copy to be either made region-free or set for any region code.
Here is a simple guide about how to use this versatile, smart yet particle DVD Shrink.
Step 1 Importing DVD movies.

Click on the button of “Open Disk”, a list of all available DVD drives on your computer will be shown. Select the one containing the movie.
If you have already ripped the DVD in file mode (thus you have a collection of .IFO, .BUP and .VOB files on your HD) press the Open Files button to browse and select the folder where your VIDEO_TS directory resides.
Once you've selected the source disc, or IFO file, DVD Shrink will perform a quick analyzing pass over all the video items.

This bar indicates the size of your project. If it contains a red part, your project is too large and won't fit onto a DVD±R disc. By default, DVD Shrink automatically selects a compression ratio to make your movie fit onto the allocated space.
Now you are able to see how the DVD video consists of, generally, there are three main categories, Menus, Main Movie and Extras.

On the right column, you are able to choose video compression, audio track and subpicture. Or you can right click the preview window to choose an audio track.

After you have finished all the settings, you can choose to decrypt and backup the videos. In this way, you can make a functionally identical backup copy without changes with this “Full Disk” mode. You can also choose the mode of “re-author” to choose specifically which DVD elements such as Main Title, audio tracks and subtitles, and Special Features to retain on the "shrunken" DVD.
After you have got the backup DVD, you are free to copy the DVD or convert the DVD to video that you can play on your iPod, iPhone, PSP, Apple TV, Zune or Creative Zen player etc. And to achieve so, you need a video converter to convert the decrypted and shrunken DVD to videos. You can try Pavtube Video Converter. It is easy to use and it converts fast, what’s more, it allows users to crop, trim and even do effect settings. Besides,Pavtube video converter is 50% discounted and you can buy Pavtube video converter only for no more than $15.
You may think this is a little bit of complicated, and you can try all in one DVD Ripper, take Pavtube DVD Ripper for example, and you can rip the DVD to video of whatever files types you need, but the trouble is you cannot back the DVD videos, and thus you are not able to copy the DVD to another disk. By the way, Pavtube has just launched a discount this week and all Pavtube Products are 50% discounted, Pavtube DVD Ripper is of no exception, meaning that you can buy a DVD Ripper just with no more than $18.
So, to sum up, you need to choose software according to what you need and what you want exactly.