newbie question on how to "dvd to hd to dvd"

[jbg]

Hello and appologies for not scanning through the site as I have just joined and am late to to go out to work as it is..
I have a DVD that my kiddie did a pen drawing on slightly scratching the disk and thought why not just copy it and so thinking that was easy tried, nope it was "css" protected. ok then fair enough copyright and all that, but then I came across this site and wow, gents you seem to know your stuff, so could you figure this one out.
Using DVD Decrypter as you have written, no problem there, saved it to my HD as a "video TS " file etc.
Now this is where I seem to be doing something wrong. Fired up my Pinnacle Instant copy package and yes it did it's thing, well to a extent, it came up with " file to large 4.9gb ..", and it would not go any further.
So I tried to copy just the first track (it is a Rage against the machine dvd,or was to look at anyway haha) this it did straight to DVD no probs, but it means I have second half, so how do you get 9gb's onto a 4.7gb disk.
Now before you tell me to read a previous thread, could you please do a "idiots" guide ie
1) put dvd into machine etc etc
as I am albeit computer illiterate.
Oh the other perplexer is that the ts file I copied was 550mb and when I checked the actual size of it on the DVD it was approx double that, again why is that.
Any help will be much appreciated and will be implemented after work..
thanx
jbg

 

[RASTABT]

Have a look at the by Laz. Thats the baby
You need to download DVDShrink which is freeware at will shring your DVD so you can then burn it to disc.

 

[jbg]

Thanx for the help though I have another question

Thankyou Rastabt,
That idiots guide helped me out and even though DVD shrink did the compression, upon playback I can see the picture being made up of squares in certain camera angles where on the original this did not happen, so the question is : did I do something wrong or missed something out??? again thanx for the help and look forward to your or whoevers reply.
Happy as larry
jbg

 

[AZImmortal]

the squares you see are called "macroblocks", and they're the result of the transcoder doing a less-than-stellar job of compressing the video. if you want to have the best quality with dvd backups, you'll have to use an encoder (such as Cinema Craft Encoder, aka: CCE) to reencode the video (instead of transcoding it), which is typically a bit more involved, but the quality is much better. however, a new tool is being developed that uses CCE to reencode the video but has the ease of use of a transcoder. you can find more info about it here.

 

[jbg]

thanks for the reply

ok, as I have only just got my head around the first reply's info, this one upon reading all the links is a tad over my head, cripes serious application of the old grey matter is needed to quantify it all.
So the macroblocking of this particular DVD is it due to it being a music DVD or does that happen with films and the like??.
Without getting to deep are there any other "simpler" ways (and I mean me being simple there) of improving the quality.
Again thankyou all for yor time.
jbg

 

[AZImmortal]

the link i gave to dvd rebuilder is literally about as easy as it gets to create arguably the best-looking backups you can get. macroblocking can occur anytime a video stream is compressed too much for the transcoder to handle properly. some transcoders do a better job at handling it than others, but CCE is definitely the best choice if you're most concerned about quality.