Video recording

I recently borrowed an instructional video (DVD) and decided to copy the files to my hard-disk before I returned it, so I could burn my own copy. I've never used DVD-RW disks before but purchased some in order to make my copy. I created the ISO image with AmiDVD and then discovered that the image file is larger than the capacity of a DVD-RW. It must be possible since I keep reading about people "bootlegging" DVD movies. Is there a way for me to make a copy of the instructional video?

While working on the video, I noticed that if I mount DVD+RW instead of DVD-RW or in addition to DVD-RW, the DVD-RW formatting fails. Can I assume that the DVD+RW is for reading DVD+RW disks and not writing them?

@xenic

Although it's not the software I use, "DVD Shrink" on Windows is what most people use.

On Linux there is "K9Copy".

Mount the .iso, or select the folder of files, and have it transcode it to smaller files (it's very quick, MPEG-2 allows this quick type of transcoding not available on other codecs), then burn it.

@xenic

Commercial DVDs are dual-layer, and thus contain 8.5 GB instead of 4.7. You either need to have a dual-layer DVD writer and a blank dual-layer disk, or you need to recode the video files to have a lower bit-rate. Lowering the bit-rate will lower the quality.

Hans

I'd like to add that with "DVD Shrink" you can also remove menus, extras and other stuff you don't want that take up space on the DVD (like subtitles in languages you don't understand and extra audio tracks that you're not going to use). Doing this you won't have to compress the video as much and if you're lucky it won't need any additional compressing at all to fit on a normal 4.7GB DVD.

@xenic

This tool may be useful...

http://os4depot.net/download.php?file=video/misc/peevobill.lha

Peevobil is far from being a complete tool perfect but it will work for some DVDs.

@salass00
Thanks to you and everyone else who responded. Now I know that I need to shrink the files to fit a DVD-RW. Since I never used DVD-RW before, I didn't realize that real DVDs have a larger capacity. Since the video I want to duplicate is just charts and a speaker in front of a desk, I don't think the video quality will detract much from the information it contains. I'll try some of the suggested software.