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Old 03-07-2017, 07:18 AM
musicman691 musicman691 is offline
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Join Date: Dec 2009
Location: The Sopranos State (NJ)
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Default Re: Fellow Whovians - need your help

Quote:
Originally Posted by mjslakeridge View Post
I didn't realize you were on a Mac. If you Google around for "DVD Shrink for Mac", it looks like there are some solutions available, but I cannot vouch for the safety of any of those sites. I have used DVD Shrink for years to rip DVDs into my computer and to make safety copies. If the DVD is over 4.7GB due to multiple audio languages, closed captioning, etc., DVD shrink will compress the files to fit on a 4.7GB DVD. You can also re-author the disk, copying only the sections you want (exclude director's comments, etc.)

DVD Decrytper is a similar program, and I have used it to read from a DVD that may have some scratches or unreadable sectors. It doesn't compress the files, but if they are successfully read into your HDD with Decrypter, then you can run DVD Shrink to do the compression. But I am not aware of any Mac equivalent.

I have over a hundred DVD+R's that I have burned, and I don't recall any of them failing. I also burn quite a few DVD-RW's so we can watch a movie, and then re-write over it for the next movie, and I have had a number of them go bad after many re-writes, but a pack of 25 are quite cheap at MicroCenter, so I just replace the bad ones in my rotation of 10 or so.

If you could borrow a Windows PC or laptop, I could email you the zipped installation files for DVD Shrink and DVD Decrypter, as they are quite small, and as I said above, have had them on several of my computers (Windows XP, 7, 8 and 8.1), for years.
Thanks for the offer - I'll have to see if my ancient Windows laptop running XP still boots or not. Haven't started that thing up in a couple of years since I found Mac equivalents for the s/w I used particularly CD Architect. I don't really need to shrink them down but just be able to watch them on a standard dvd player.

Like you I have yet to have self-burned dvd's/cd's go bad on me other than again, just like you, have had rewritable media turn into coasters on reuse. I buy by the 50 or 100 spindle so that brings the costs way down.
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