Ever wanted to compress your huge 4GB+ DVD movies to 700MB dvd-rips while still retaining the original DVD quality? Well thats what we’re gonna learn today. You might be familiar with the regular 700MB dvd-rips ’scene’ releases, where most underground DVD movies are in 700mb compressed avi format. Today we’ll learn how to compress your personal DVD movies to small 700MB compressed format like the ’scene’ releases, so that you can keep your DVDs safe in your drawer and enjoy watching the compressed rips from your hard disk drive.

Now if you’re familiar with the ‘xvid asd’ compression format used for those tv-shows rips, you might know how nicely compressed those videos are. You get a complete 50minutes season video in a 350MB avi file. We’re gonna use that sort of superb compression for our DVD today in this following tutorial. You’ll see that even when our ~4GB DVD movie is compressed to a 700MB dvd-rip, there wont be much difference in the video or audio qualitybecause of the compression softwares and audio/video settings we’re going to use.

We’ll be using this very nice Xvid/DivX conversion tool called ‘Auto Gordian Knot’ for ripping our DVD, head over here and dowload the free full package. Next step is to install the program, so do so. You’ll be asked for permission for installation of a few plugins, tick yes.

After its installed, head over to Start menu > Program Files > Auto GK and run Auto GK. Here’s how it should appear.

  1. Now get your favorite DVD disc and insert it.
  2. Go to My Computer, right click on the DVD-drive icon, and select OPEN
  3. You’ll see the contents of the DVD disc. Go to to VIDEO_TS directory.
  4. You should see files name like VTS_01_1.VOB, VTS_01_2.VOB, the files that are big in size are the ones that have the actually movie, the rest of the smaller files in KBs aren’t of our use (see the image below to have an idea).
  5. The big files are the ones that have the movie, ignore the smaller KB files

    The big files are the ones that have the movie, ignore the smaller KB files

  6. now open the first BIG file in the series ( VTS_01_0.VOB in this case) and open it with your DVD media player, if its a video of the DVD title menu or some other unnecessary file, close the media player, try the next file.
  7. When u find the file from where the movie starts actually, close the media player, and get back to Auto Gordian Knot and select that VOB file in the “Input Area”. Also select where u want to save the compressed dvd-rip. should look something like the screenshot below.

  8. Select the correct VOB file in the input area, make sure its the file which containts the beginning of the movie

    Select the correct VOB file in the input area, make sure its the file which containts the beginning of the movie


  9. In Auto GK’s window, come down to where it says “Step 3 – Select output size”, select Custom Size and input 700 in the text box in front of that option. like shown below
  10. Enter the 700MB size in the cutom size box

    Enter the 700MB size in the cutom size box

  11. Now click on Advanced options, you’ll see a window like the in the image below, set all your options as the appear in the image. i.e. select the audio quality to 128 kbps (its more than enough for a dvd movie), and select video size to 800 (you can keep it around 768 pixels also +- if you want to), in any case the video size should not be more than the dvd’s video size, as ‘upscaling’ the video size in the rip wont make the quality any more better, anyway take a look at the image below

  12. Selecting between the DivX or XviD plugin is your own choice, if your DVD player has DivX support then choose DivX

    Selecting between the DivX or XviD plugin is your own choice, if your DVD player has DivX support then choose DivX


  13. Now click on ‘Add job’, you’ll see the video address appear in the job queue. Press start and the program will start ripping your dvd.

Please be patient now, since compression is an exhaustive process. It’ll take more than an hour for one DVD to be compressed. You’ll see a DOS prompt window pop-up (that’s for the audio compression algorithms), then you’ll see the DUB window pop up for awhile while Auto Guardian Knot uses it for video compression.

End Result, finally a 700mb DVD rip is generated from the 4GB DVD:

In my example, I used my Saw IV movie DVD, on which the video files were around 3.9GB.  My C2D 2.66GHz cpu with 4GB of DDRII ram took 1 hour 40 minutes to make the 700mb dvd-rip. So while Auto GK is making your dvd-rip, you can do something else in the meanwhile. By the way, here’s how the 702mb DVD-rip quality looks like now, a screen shot of the dvd-rip movie (click on the image to see full size in new window).

SAW IV movie 700MB DVD-rip screen shot, the DVD-rip is made from the Original 4+GB DVD

SAW IV movie 700MB DVD-rip screen shot, the DVD-rip is made from the Original 4+GB DVD, click to see in full size

Now you can save all your DVD movies on your HDD in 700MB dvd-rips form, that’d take very little space compared to if you tried saving the original 4GB+ dvd on your HDD. I hope this guide has helped you in someway.

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Written by Muhammad Abbas on August 20, 2008

Filed under: guide, movies, optical media, storage, video

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