How can I burn a DVD from start to finish

[kip182]

Hi I’m new to macs and laptops… Which isn’t the best combination for me considering I just brought a new macbook pro laptop running mac osx tiger 10.4. Most things I can figure out. But dvd burning has got me stumped.

I have read many threads here already regarding this issue but none have made it much clearer for me.

I recently brought the movie Kingdom of Heaven on dvd and was wanting to make a backup copy of it. With all the extra features and everything. I understand there will probably be a slightly quality loss. I want it to play exactly how the real dvd does, and for it to work on any dvd player… not just my laptops. But I don’t have a clue how to go about getting it onto a blank dvd once I put the real dvd into the disc drive.

How do I go about burning this dvd to a blank dvd from the moment I have put it into the drive? I want every step if possible no matter how easy or hard it sounds because I am a real amateur at this. Oh and the dvd is 7+GB so I would also like to know how to compress it. Does iDVD or iMOVIE or any of the iLife programs do that? If So… how?

Keep in mind its on a laptop. Which means I Only have one disc drive. Although I probably didn’t need to tell you that.

Any help is greatly appreciated and I thank you so very much.

[Mikuro]

Wrong forum, wrong title. ***This Forum is for Tutorials and Guides only, not questions***

Anyway...

First, use MacTheRipper top copy the contents of your DVD to your hard disk. Then use a burning program like Toast to burn the DVD contents from your HD to a DVD in DVD-ROM/UDF format. You'll probably need to use a double-layer disk to fit most commercial DVDs. (Edit: I guess most MBPs don't support double-layer burning. Sorry.)

If you want to cram a large (~7GB+) DVD onto a single-layer (4.38GB) DVD±R, you'll need to reencode it. Unlike the above method, this is slow, complicated, and results in quality loss. There are some programs, like DVD2oneX, that supposedly make this easy, but I've never used them myself.

[fryke]

If you can afford it, FastDVDCopy is simply the easiest and best solution. It does all in one go. But it costs money.

[kip182]

Are mactheripper and toast free? And easily downloadable?

[Mikuro]

MacTheRipper is freeware. See my link.

Toast is commercial, but I think there are freeware disc burners that will allow you to burn DVD in UDF (video DVD) format. I believe YuBurner is one, although I've never personally used it for this task.