Linux Multimedia Hacks

Convert Dual-Layer DVD to Single-Layer DVD

Use command-line and graphical tools to shrink a dual-layer DVD to fit on a single-layer disk.

It used to be that most DVD movies were released on 4.7 GB DVDs. If you wanted to create an archival copy, you could just do a direct copy of the DVD. Nowadays, many DVDs are released on a dual-layer disc (sometimes referred to as DVD9) that can store twice the amount of data as a single-layer disc (or DVD4). While dual-layer DVD burners are available, if you only have a single-layer model, you can’t directly copy the DVD to a new disc. First, you must shrink down (requantize) the MPEG2 video so that it can fit on a 4.7 GB disc and then create a DVD based on the new video. DVD Shrink under Windows is a popular tool to use for this task, and while there isn’t a feature-for-feature direct equivalent under Linux (apart from running DVD Shrink in Linux using WINE, which is a route some people take), there are some tools available that can at least help you shrink down the main title of a DVD to fit on a 4.7 GB DVD.

Most DVD-shrinking tools under Linux act as frontends for transcode and a number of other command-line video tools. This hack covers dvdshrink, batchrip.sh, and their graphical frontend, xDVDShrink, but you may also want to check out a totally different graphical tool called k9copy at http://k9copy.free.fr.

The first step is to download and install the complete set of dvdshrink tools. Go to the official project at http://dvdshrink.sourceforge.net ...