NAbsentia or Anyone DVD Recording Question on Stand Alones

[EdwardGein]

Out of curiosity, lets say the DVD I bought with full interactive menu, movie & special features is 3 hours total, isn't encrypted and I was copying this to a stand alone recorder not a DVD burner. 1. If I wished to fit the whole DVD into the DVD I was recording, I would have to record at LP 4 Hour recording not SP 2 hour recording, right- Sorry for aasking the fairly obvious but I just wanted this confirmed. On DVD Shrink when the stuff is compressed is it doing that on the 2 Hour SP mode? 2. Lets say the nonencrypted DVD menu had 2 options- Play Movie & Special Features (deleted scenes, etc.). The only way I can record that to a stand alone is playing & recording the movie first & then seperately playing & recording the special features right, unlike DVD Shrink which does everything for you automatically? How would I record the interactive menu & would it even be interactive? Thanks for any answers. I'm going to stick with DVD Shrink but just want to understand stand alone recording better.

[N. Abstentia]

You can think of a standalone recorder just like a VCR that records onto DVD's instead of tape. So no, you would lose the menus. It can only record what is played into it. You can capture the extras just by playing and recording them. You'd also lose any digital soundtracks and the sound would be converted to analog.

A DVD recorder & Shrink work in two different ways. A DVD recorder fits more data by lowering the capture bitrate. The lower the bitrate, the more space available, but quality suffers.

Shrink simply just compresses the mpeg video to make it fit a certain size..such as 4.3 gigs. It does not care how long the video is, just as long as it doesn't go over 4.3 gigs.

And yes, to capture 3 hours of video you'll use the 4 hour mode.

[EdwardGein]

Thanks

[paul_pci]

It's so nice to see the two of you get along so harmoniously. (no remote pun intended).