BernieMac: Mac OS; DVD ripping/burning dilemma

Recently I started working on Mac OS-X , Got this fine Apple previous G4 with the Superdrive from friend of mine . I discovered few interesting things as far as DVD ripping and burning is concerned, after a long struggle on few things. I thought this would be useful for folks out there who want something quick about this part of the world.
To burn DVD movie which is as big as 8 GB to 10 GB is a pain. You have couple of options.

• Have a Dual layer DVD 8.X GB, and burn your movie or data on that, But bummer is you will need a dual layer DVD-RW drive, which is not a great option
• Second and best option is compress the movie or data file which is greater that 4.7 GB and then burn it on the standard blank DVD-R(+R/RW) disk

This gets extremely easy on Windows , just download DVDShrink , this puppy is one of the best of application ever written and best it is free, it does 2 important things

• Rips the DVD data from the source
• Compresses the data to the best compression % possible with default compression algorithms.
  

After that all you have to use a normal burning utilities like Nero or Roxio to burn the data. Simple and elegant.

Now How about Mac-OS, it gets little tricky and complex than that, primary reason is there is no DVDShrink available for Mac-OS, moreover its quite a work to find free and good software to find on Mac. So consider following options

• MacTheRipper : Tiny little ripping tool (Its free) does a great job of ripping the DVD into VIDEO_TS format. Some of the rips doesn't work good for burning.
• DVD2Onex This is a ripping + compression tool, works pretty well. Got to pay, you get one free rip with free download.
  
• Roxio Popcorn This one is ripping + compressing + burning tool , so that makes it best of all of the above , again you got to pay for this one, but I would say it is totally worth it. You put a Source DVD, it will start ripping + compressing and once it is done, you pop out source dvd and pop in blank dvd and it will write the compressed data. With real good quality.

For burning on Mac, you can use Mac OS's in house iTunes, DiskImage, DiskUtility and Free softwares out there or commercial softwares like Roxio Toast Lite/Titanium. For more info on any of the above go to this Wiki

Have a great time ripping _and_ compressing _and_ burning.