Printable DVD Media??/DVD Backup Questions

[maximus01can]

Howdy All,

Before I get started asking again, I must say a big thanks to all the people who take the time to answer our questions and direct us to places that make things which once seemed so hard, alot easier. With a couple excellent guides on shrinking and burning, I've finally burnt backups of my first few DVD's with more to come. It all seems pretty easy now that I've found out what to use and how to use it. The questions I have now are:

1) If I buy printable DVD's will I be able to use them with my Cannon S530D printer or will I need special software to print labels for my DVD's. I already have a CD Stomper and it sticks on printed labels, but I thought it might be better to have the print directly on the disk so it won't peel off it time??

2) I'm using DVDShrink(Free) and Nero 6.0 trial version to burn my DVD's. I've heard talk about DXDxCopy and some other brands of software.....Are these really any better than the ones I'm using or should I just stick with what's working for me now??

3) I was snooping through the sony downloads section for the DRU510A I have and it mentioned a free download of this software....and some others....

(DSS (Drive Speed Selector) is Sony software that allows you to optimize the read/write speed of your DRU-510A and DRX-510UL DVD/CD rewritable drives only. This software is available to you provided you take our on-line survey.)

...Is there any advantage using this software as I'm kinda chicken to download stuff seeings my burner is working just fine and I don't want any grief??

4) When using DVDshrink, the automatic compression on the video portion of the main movie usually ends up being somewhere between 65 and 90%. That's after I've unchecked all the unwanted languages/subtitles etc. on the Menu's and Extras and the reproduction seems to still look pretty good when replaying them on my TV. Is there a cutoff where I should be nuking the menus and other stuff to get a high quality reproduction of the video itself?. Is there a shrink/decrypt program that will allow you to keep the menu's intact and delete all the Extra's etc. while keeping the video quality high??

Well that's enought for now

Thanks Again,
Max

[phenious]

I say stick with DVD Shrink, DVD2AVI, and TMPGenc, and some form of DVD software. I prefere to use DVD shrink extract the VOBs of just the movie with no compression to my HDD. Encode the VOBs into a editable Mpeg2 file and then use what ever I want to make a DVD with a cool menu and my own special features. When using TMPGenc to encode the video I set it to take up 4GB so that leaves enough space to put on a trialer or some cool menus or what have you

-: phenious :-