Have you ever wanted to backup your DVDs? I have. And I thought it was really hard, but it’s not. Mark Cuban recently talked about this  in his blog, so I thought I’d address it here.

DISCLAIMER:
I’d like to mention that this may or may not be legal. The program used to do this uses decypting, so this could be illegal. The following information and links are provided for informational/educational use only.

There are two programs needed to backup DVDs. The first is DVD Shrink. With this program you have the option to either make a full-disc backup of the DVD or re-author the disc. Full-disc mode takes everything that is on the original disc and shrinks it down so it will fit on a standard 4.7GB DVD-Recordable disc.

The re-author mode is cool because you can choose what content to include on the disc. If you don’t want to have any of the subtitles or alternate audio, you can choose to not include them. By doing this the quality of the video with improve.

There is one other program that’s useful in backing up DVDs. It’s PocketDivXEncoder. You’ll need to download the DivX Codecs before you can use this program. This program allows you to take the DVD that you ripped using DVD Shrink and save it as a DivX encoded avi file. This is nice in case you are going to go on a trip and you don’t want to keep track of a bunch of discs. You can backup the movies you want to watch, save them as standard video files, and watch them whenever you want. This method is great becasue you won’t use up as much battery life by not using your DVD drive.