Ever since man discovered a way to record audio sounds, there has always been the problem of copying one record, tape, cassette, CD or DVD to another one. Some manufactures have even offered dual deck recorders that allowed “dubbing” or making a duplicate of the media in the other drive.

I haven’t seen any dual DVD burners although you can always install two of them in your computer and then copy from one to the other. If you have a lot of DVDs you will need to make a backup copy just in case something happens to the original. I always use the backup copy for normal viewing and keep the originals properly stored in a safe place. So, to back up your DVDs you need a tool that will let you:

• Copy the content from the DVD
• Make the best possible copy
• Preferably only have to buy one tool to do it.

Your DVD burner should have come with burning software. The only way to find out if this software will do the job you want is to test it by making a copy of one of your DVDs then play it back in your DVD player that is hooked up to your television to see what kind of quality you got.

The reality is that you will not find one tool that can do it all. Many claim to do so, but none of them totally succeed, at least not if you want the best quality copies.

One of the primary problems with making good backup copies is that commercially recorded DVDs are usually on dual layer media. Most burners are for single layer media only so you will either have to use two DVDs, only copy part of the material on the DVD or use a compression algorithm to fit everything on one DVD. Compression will reduce the video and audio quality.

The first thing you need to do is decide what content on the DVD you want to backup. You want the movie obviously, but do you really need multiple language versions, subtitles, trailers, cast interviews or both the 4:3 and widescreen versions? Probably not…

Another issue is transcoding which is a method of reducing the size of an MPEG video file without needing to re-encode the entire movie. This is done by eliminating data you can’t see or hear on the screen. There are many applications available. Some of the better ones for reducing the file size are DVD2ONE, Nero’s Recode, DVD Shrink and Pinnacle Instant Copy DVD.

No matter which applications you use the first step is to rip the DVD and remove unwanted stuff then select what you want to keep. You will most likely want to select these options:

• Select the English version of the picture and sub picture
• If your sound system supports the DTS format, then only backup the DTS sound track. It provides the best audio. Leave the smaller AC-3-2 soundtracks because they are the ones normally used with the menus.
• If you don’t have support for the DTS sound track then select all the English and unspecified AC3 tracks.
• Select NO COMPRESSION to maintain quality (we will compress it when we transcode.)

Next save your selections. Depending on the program used, you may be able to save it directly to the hard drive or you may need to go through other menus. You want to save it to your hard drive with a different name than the one you created directly from the DVD. The program will decrypt the movie and save it to your hard drive. It can take quite a while, so be patient.

Next you may need additional software such as DVDRemake that allows you to remove foreign language menus, trailers, movie previews and other unwanted content if your program doesn’t have that feature. Save your project to the hard drive again with a different name.

Next use software to edit the menus so you can remove the buttons and links to the features you removed in previous steps. Then save your project, again with a different name.

If you have trimmed the file size to less than 4.3 GB, you can now safely burn your backup to a DVD. If not you will need to transcode the file and then burn it to the DVD. As always, after the transcoding is finished, save the file with a different name. Using different names at each step of the process will help make the process shorter if you are not satisfied with the quality of your copy or if you decide to change something and need to redo it.

When finished, take the backup copy and test it in your DVD player to make sure it works properly. If it does, store the original in a safe place. If not, use the copy of the original you saved to your hard drive to try again until you get a good backup. The first time you may need to do this a couple of times until you learn how to use your software. After that, it will be a no-brainer to back up the rest of your DVDs.