As a parent of small children I sometimes wonder how we did without DVD’s back when I was a kid growing up in the 70′s and 80′s. The one eyed monster would have been so much cooler if you could have controlled what he spit out. But alas, our household never even had a VCR. They were way too expensive. In fact, I still remember paying $300 for a Sony Hi-Fi VCR in the mid-to-late nineties. How far we have come! These days the far superior DVD player can be had for about 10% of that cost. Unfortunately, the price of most movies on DVD is still around $20. That is way too expensive when you have little hands in the house who smudge, scratch and otherwise abuse one of the most fragile forms of media known to man. I would estimate that 1 in 4 of our children’s movie collection are damaged in such a manner that their playback is compromised (either skipping in parts or completely unplayable). To make matters worse, copyright protections have made it extremely difficult to do back-ups of your own movies for personal use, even though that was standard practice for music before the rise of the internet. That is, it used to be difficult.
This evening I used a free program called DVD Shrink to decode and re-author a few of the kid’s movies. DVD Shrink allows you to compress a large movie into a format that can later be burned onto a 4.7 GB recordable DVD. You can use any DVD burning software (Roxio, Nero, etc.) to make the disc, but DVD Shrink recognized that my PC already had DVD Decrypter (also free) installed and allowed for a near-seamless transition (simply had to remove the movie, insert a DVD-R and hit the ‘record’ button). After making a few copies with all of the bells and whistles (menus, bonus features, etc.), I then decided to try the ‘re-author’ feature and burn a DVD with just the core movie file itself. Later, I tested it in our minivan’s rear entertainment system and immediately recognized the beauty of backing up your DVD’s without any extras.
Picture yourself driving down the highway at 65 mph. You are in the front passenger seat. Your kids are in the middle and third rows, securely strapped into their child car seats. The DVD screen is also behind you where you cannot see it without unbuckling your seatbelt and reclining your seat. With a stripped down movie copy all you have to do is insert the DVD-R into the dash and it immediately starts playing — no previews, special features or menus to wade through. Safe. Easy. Disposable. How cool is that? I know what I will be doing between now and our next car trip (keeping an eye out for a spindle pack of DVD-R’s and setting aside some time in the evenings).
