I started burning dvds last night by following the dvdfabdecrpyt/fix/shrink/imgburn tutorial. i successfully burned 2 movies, but when i put them in the dvd player, i realized that there was no menu, it just started playing. as i am not an EXTREME newbie, i realized it was because when i put the vidts file in shrink and it came up with the main movie, the other item i moved to the left was the main movie. So when i tried burning the fast and the furious, i moved all of the menu items to the left. However, when i tried this, and burned them onto a disc, the movie still started out first, and after the credits, the menus were on a playlist of some sort (play and then go to the next one. is there any way to compress the menus to full quality (like the movie) and still be able to fit it on the disc???? Thanks for your help guys!
To get the entire DVD compressed, don't use the reauthor mode. Just stay in the first window and click the Backup! button. You can of course eliminate audio tracks you don't want, but that's it. Unfortunately the video quality will be a victim of doing this. Shrink only allows sequential playback of any titles reauthored in the Reauthor mode so menus do not work. If you want selective inclusion of items with the original menu, try Slysoft's CloneDVD: http://www.slysoft.com/en/clonedvd.html You can do selective stuff with PGEEdit and VOBBlanker, but there's a stiff learning curve.
i know that there is a way to compress the selected menus (just the menus) by using a custom ratio under the compression settings, but there is no other way to do it with shrink and still maintain the quality of video?
You can use the custom compression option for any item. You can decrease the amount of space any particular item requires by choosing "still image". That item will effectively be blanked from the disk since it will be just single still images and not video. You can use the custom compression option and use the most compression on the menus and special features you want to be able view and then use still image on items you don't care to be able to view. That'll leave the most available space for the main title and the best video quality. After clicking the Backup! button, also choose "Perform Deep Analysis" on the Quality Settings tab as well as (below) "high quality adaptive error compensation" using the Sharp (default) setting. That'll likely give you the best quality possible for cramming everything onto a DVD5. You could also just put the main title on one DVD and the Extras with the menu on a second DVD. Use the Reauthor mode on the first to just drag over the main title. On the second, stay in full mode and set the compression to still image for the main title. There are also commercial programs that'll let you split a DVD to 2 disks. VOBBlanker (free), once you learn to use it, will allow you to blank out all items on a DVD you don't care about leaving more space for items you do care about. The DVD Shrink still image compression doesn't blank out the unwanted items it just converts them to still images to save space. http://jsoto.posunplugged.com/vobblanker.htm http://www.dvdr-digest.com/articles/article_vobblanker_page1.html
