SmallShrink 0.4 is available for download.

This version (at long last) makes it easier to work out which titles from the DVD you want to copy.

Also, I’ve finally got round to writing some instructions on how to use SmallShrink.

SmallShrink 0.4 only supports MacOSX 10.6. I thought that the previous version also worked on 10.5, but on closer inspection, it didn’t really. 10.5 support is feasible, and I hope to add it back in soon.

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SmallShrink 0.3 is available to download. This remains a fairly technical release but it makes major improvements and flexibility to the way DVDs are processed, and adds a variety of other features:

• Allows choice of tools to use for DVD extracting, demuxing and remuxing.
• Allows greater control over whether the DVD will be requantized (shrunk).
• Allows DVD titles to be extracted to individual files instead of a DVD image
• Separation of the basic and advanced controls in the user interface
• Allows temporary files to be kept or discarded
• Writes output to a log file in the specified output directory

This release has only been tested on Mac OS X 10.6.

Many of these features need a little explaining, which I will aim to document in the near future. What does need explaining now though is the extraction/demuxing/remuxing options.

The default method of extracting, demuxing and remuxing the DVD is to use mencoder. In my own tests, I’ve found that this works on almost all of my DVD collection. Although I’ve not timed it, I think that using tccat for extraction, ffmpeg for demux and mplex for remux is a little faster, but less reliable for heavily copy-protected DVDs.

If this release proves to be fairly stable, the next one will aim to hide some of the technical detail to make it more accessible for “normal” people.

Finally, the source code is now available at smallshrink.googlecode.com.

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SmallShrink 0.2 is available for download. I feel that this is a big, big improvement on the initial 0.1 release as it has numerous enhancements in the user interface.

• No longer starts a separate terminal window for the processing
• DVD target size can be specified
• Multiple titles can be extracted from a DVD and placed into the reauthored DVD (to do this, list them in the DVD titles box, separated by spaces. For example “3 4 5 6”)
• Fixed the bug that failed to handle DVD input and output paths containing spaces.

Full usage instructions to follow soon. Hopefully.

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I am pleased to announce the first release of SmallShrink.
SmallShrink extracts the main movie from a DVD, and reauthors it to fit onto a 4.7Gb single layer DVD-R. It is inspired by (but currently is nowhere near as functional as) the legendary DVD Shrink application for Windows, with a little help from the various Linux DVD9->DVD5 guides around the internet.

The initial v0.1 release provides a simple interface to a number of command line tools which do the extract, shrinking and reauthoring. It certainly can’t deal with every DVD, and works on about 80% of DVDs I’ve tried it with. More recent, heavily-copy-protected DVDs present the most trouble.

This release is very much experimental, and I welcome feedback – what DVDs does it work on, what doesn’t work? What would make it more useful? I am not yet sure of the final direction it will take – it may stay as a standalone application, or may become part of SmallDVD.

SmallShrink 0.1 requires an Intel Mac, running Mac OS X 10.6

UPDATE: Now also supports Mac OS X 10.5

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