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

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

   
   

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

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

    
    

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, 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.

There are many ISO-making tools out there that let you make virtual images of your optical media.I prefer using IsoBuster for all my ISO making tasks because its free and very easy to use. And you also get the ability to makes ISOs of scratched/damaged CDs also.

Before we continue our guide on ISO making, you need to download the latest version of IsoBuster from here. After downloading , run the setup file and install it. Once installed, you can run ISO buster from either the QuickLaunch, or you can run it from Start Menu > Programs > Smart Projects > IsoBuster. The first time you run IsoBuster, it’ll ask you for a serial number and email ID, just click on ‘free service only’.

The ISO-making process:

Now you can start the ISO-making process. Inserting the CD/DVD that you want to make an ISO image of, ISO buster will detect the disk and you’ll see the contents of the disc. Now Right-click on ‘CD’ (or ‘DVD’ if you’ve inserted a DVD) in the tree-list on the right as shown below.

IsoBuster v2.4 in Windows Vista

You’ll see a menu, click on ‘Extract CD <image>’ and then click on ‘RAW (*.bin, *.iso)’ as shown in the screenshot below.

You’ll be prompted by a new window, asking where you want to save the ISO image. Select a destination folder of your choice, and give it a name that ends with .ISO ,In my example, I’m making the ISO image of the my Intel MotherBoard Drivers CD so i named it propertly and ended the name with a .ISO extension as you can see in the image below.

Click the save button and IsoBuster will start making an ISO image of your CD/DVD. IsoBuster performs the ISO making task very fast if your disc is clean, if its scratched, it might take longer.

At the end, when the ISO image is created, IsoBuster will prompt you to save a small .CUE file which is related to your ISO image, you can discard saving that file if your CD/DVD is a simple one. But if you’re making the ISO image of a game or other protected content, then save the .CUE file in the same directory where you saved the ISO image as you’ll be needing it later on (for correct emulation in virutal drives and for making accurate copies of your discs from that ISO image).

Thats it, your ISO image is created successfully