New, and TWO for TWO...

[Think Floyd]

...so far I'm leaning towards a donation, but I'm still trying to figure out if this program is going to work for me...obviously I'm new...Laugh if you want, but I'm a writer, and far from any kind of a pro-PC-hacker/programmer-dude...but I do have an IQ high enough to be the Vice President of MENSA(but I'd never join that club-o-nerds), and I posess enough useful/useless information to be a five-time Jeopardy champion...I'm just not looking to become a PC wizard 'cuz life's too short and I have too many other things I'd rather do with my time, and so I'm having to learn what I need as I go along....anyway...I'm trying to backup my DVD collection and so I've been searching for the correct, as well as affordable, software for weeks...I'm disabled/poor, so programs like Imgburn are a big help to me, and I needed burning software becuz the Sonic that came with the rest of the crap that Dell bloated my PC with was useless (and from the sound of it I may be the only person in the world that doesn't have NERO)

 

I have a year old Dell E510 with a Pentium 4 3.0Gig processor; MS XP Pro/Media Center 2006 - version 5.1 SP2 build 2600; 250gig HD; 1gig DDRII memory; a TSST(Toshiba/Samsung) DVD-ROM and a Philips DVD+-RW DVD8701 with the 5D24 firmware 'revision'....it's OK, I guess...but Dell was a real hassle dealing with when I needed a new PC after Hurricane Rita...you'd think a Texas company would've wanted to look good for helping Texans in a crisis, but fat chance.

 

...just thought I'd report my progress in case anyone was interested...

 

So far I'm 2 for 2...I've attempted two burns and both turned out fine...no 'coasters'(yet)...I don't know if it's rated very highly, but this Philips DVD8701 burner seems to work pretty well with Imgburn...maybe I just got lucky.

 

I spent two days trying to figure out what to do and how to do it...looked at guides...forums...everything I could find in the way of intstructions (that's something I will soon discuss in the proper forum)...

 

The 1st movie I backed-up I wasn't able to notice much becuz I was just happy I had got that far finally...

 

The 2nd movie went better...below are a few details as I have no log to post...

 

The first burn I used a DVD+R blank, and the 2nd burn I used a DVD-R blank...both the MAXELL media...

 

for both I used the DVDShrink to copy the movies to my HD in ISO files...

 

...then I went back later and burned them with Imgburn...

 

for both burns I used what I hoped were decent DVD blanks...they are MAXELL, but the media ID shows RITEK(02 or 03, I don't remember the number after RITEK)...

 

both burns were 'Full Disc'...

 

the 2nd burn went fast...like I said, I don't have a log or anything like that to show, but I watched the burn speed during the burn...

 

The movie is 108 minutes long and the special features are on a seperate disc...so the flick was only 4,500MB with NO compression...(had to ignore prompts/warnings that said the file was too big becuz other info said I had 4,700MB's of free space on the new blank disc)

 

with the burn speed set on AUTOMATIC/MAX I watched as the speed of the burn skipped back and forth between 11X and 14+X...and the burn only took a few minutes...

 

it took just about as long to verify each burn as it did to do the burn's themselves...which I'm guessing is good as long as the movie turns out good.

 

The little prompt box told me both burns were successful when I was done...

 

For both burns I only did the basic analysis....no deep analysis(but I will give it a try)

 

and last, but certainly not least, I took the time to view both movies all the way thru and both looked fine...in fact the second burn - *a newer film - looked great...great color and sharpness, and not a single stutter, stall, or skip on either DVD....and I played them back on three different players, so they were recognized.

 

With all of the 'making coasters' references I read while trying to figure this stuff out I purposely chose easy movies for my first try at burning (I had already burned music CDs with no trouble at all)...

 

but now I have to figure out how to do this 'Re-Authoring' stuff becuz many of the DVDs I want to backup have lots of special features I don't care to copy with the movies....so now I have to try and figure out all of this subpicture-menu-audio-title-juggling...

 

...and I'd like to find out whether this 'enable I/O overlapping', and/or reading blocks 64K or 32K at a time will help at all on this Philips burner hardware.

 

...and it would really be great if I knew how to get DVDShrink to pull up Imgburn to do the burn after the ISO files are ready to go...so far nothing I've read anywhere has helped...but that's partly my fault as I'm trying to do all this as quickly as I can. I've got a lot of movies to backup...I've got a hundred pack of Taiyo Yuden blanks on the way to get me started...

 

I REALLY APPRECIATE YOU GUYS LIKE 'LIGHTNING UK' FOR MAKING PROGRAMS/SOFTWARE LIKE THIS AVAILABLE FOR FREE(especially to really smart PC retards like me)...SO PLEASE DON'T THINK THAT I'M COMPLAINING...IF I DECIDE TO KEEP IMGBURN I WILL DEFINITELY DONATE TO THE CAUSE.(I'm not pickin' on anyone...I'm still not sure I'm keeping the DVDShrink either...I tried DVD Copier 3.2.0.0 for a day or two and it was about as useless as a hog goin' ta Sundee skool/the trial SONIC DVD software that came with this Dell)...

 

...Just for making something like this available you're a right DIAMOND GEEZER in my book, Lightnin'...the Collie's Conkers!

 

Slainte agus saol agat...

T. Floyd

 

*the first burn was of an older 1960's classic movie, and even the original DVD picture quality wasn't that great - Low-Def at best - so it was difficult to judge picture quality on that burn...by the way - it didn't have to be compressed either.

[spinningwheel]

Floyd;

 

First of all, welcome to the forum.

 

As far as using the features of Shrink, I'd suggest that you GOOGLE DVDShrink and go from there since we cannot and do not discuss ripping/copy right protection/or any rippers on this forum.

 

A couple ideas to ensure the best burns that you can make:

 

1. Make sure that you are using only Verbatim DataLife Plus ot Taiyo Yuden discs. There are many other brand names out there but none of them surpass the TY's Or Verbs.

 

2. Make sure that your burners firmware is up to date.

 

3. Use a program, like End-it-All, to shut down all unnecessary background programs before starting your project.

 

4. Don't multi-task while doing your project. If good and reliable copies and originals are what you are after, take the time to do them right using all of your machine resources.

 

5. When you run into a problem, and you will, always post the IB generated logfile along with your question. It contains information that we use to determine what happened/what we need to advise you to do.

 

6. Max speed is cool to use, but I burn no faster than 8X on singledensity media and have not had a failure in quite a long time.

 

7. ImgBurn is better than Roxio or Nero...period.