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Guides and articles
Guides and articles
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How to Shrink DVD Menus with MenuShrink
 Anybody who likes to backup their personally owned DVDs to DVDR could tell you that huge menu's are often a problem to compress while maintaining quality. MenuShrink is a nice little program that shrinks the size of your DVD menus by converting motion menu's to still menus, with or without background audio. This ultra-fast process could easily shrink a DVD menu to 5% of its original size while keeping the main menu functionality. Since several menus may exist on one disc, the program also lets you select what menu's you want converted. The newest version now lets you change which I Frame you want on your output menu, and the latest version also has the ability to allow you to preview the menu during the processing. While DVD Shrink can convert motion menu's to still menu's, it cannot keep the full functionality of the menu like MenuShrink can, so you might like to use this program before you use DVD Shrink.
Introduction & Requirements
MenuShrink - There is no installation, just put the file into any folder and run.
I am using my copy of Finding Nemo (R2) for this process. The menus on this disc take up about 682.53MB of data. I am going to change these menus to still menus with MenuShrink without the background audio. It is important to point out that the original menus can easily be restored after the process.
Do you really need to shrink your Menus?
It depends on your DVD. This guide is designed to help you with making higher quality backups, freeing up space by shrinking your Motion Menus to still menus. The main thing to check is the size of the DVD. If your DVD is less than 4.36GB, then really you don't need to Shrink Menus or compress anything, since your source DVD is DVD-5, it will fit perfectly onto blank blank DVD media. If your DVD is less than 4.36GB, then use this guide instead. If it is larger than 4.36GB, then it's a DVD-9 and will need to be compressed to fit on a blank DVD disc (unless it's DL media). Strictly speaking, if your DVD has big motion menus and you don't mind changing them to still menus, then MenuShrink is exactly what you need.
The MenuShrink Window
 The MenuShrink main window is very easy to understand. As you can see there is no Open buttons. In order to open a DVD that's on your HDD with this program you need to drag the folder that contains the DVD files into the window and it should load up properly then. The Keep Audio checkbox should be selected if you want to keep the background audio.
The About / Help button shows you some information on the program and the guys who made it, and also includes a user manual. The DVD Shrink button will launch DVD Shrink, and if you have any DVD currently open in MenuShrink, it will load it into DVD Shrink automatically. In the latest version, her is a PowerDVD button that will launch PowerDVD if it is installed on your computer. You can also use the Set Paths button to put in more links to programs, like DVD Rebuilder for example.
MenuShrink Step 1 - Open DVD
 In order to open a DVD in MenuShrink you need to drag the folder that contains the DVD files onto the program window. In most cases this would be a VIDEO_TS folder. The first thing you should do is choose whether you want to keep the background audio or not. Of course the menu will be smaller in size if you decide not to keep the background audio. After this you could simply click Process! to begin the conversion from motion menus to still frame menus but instead we will click the Advanced options button first and see if there's anything we can set.
MenuShrink Step 2 - Advanced Options
 The first thing you notice here is ability to remove any of the menus on the disc from the process, if you would prefer to keep it as a motion menu. All of them will be selected by default. Now look under Frame select, the latest version of the program now contains a slider. The frame select slider is really there now as a quick option. If you select Preview select, then you will be able to change the frame that you select for each menu background during the process. This allows you to choose the best look for your Menu. If you keep it unticked, then MenuShrink will select any background, based on the slider.
Remove "stop" in subpics should stay selected. Inf. still times (no audio) means that if you are not using background audio, the still frames will be set to display infinitely. You also have the option to skip intro/outro clips, which I find a good option. When you are finished here simply close Advanced Options.
MenuShrink Step 3 - Process 1. Auto
 The process will be different depending on your Options. If you decided not to select Preview Select then the process will literally only take a few seconds, but your results will vary. You can easily restore the original menu if the results aren't what you expected. I do recommend that you choose Preview Select as it will allow you to choose different frames as your background and shouldn't take too long (unless of course you have a MASSIVE menu).
MenuShrink Step 3 - Process 2. Preview Select
 The latest version of MenuShrink allows you to preview the output menu during the processing. As you can see you can select a different background for the menu using the slider once again. When you click OK, then the frame selection will be made. If you click Abort, then the entire process will be aborted immediately. If you click Auto, it will set your current frame selection but will automatically pick frames for other menus in the same VTS.
The direction buttons to the right of the slider are self explanatory, the first button will move to the start frame, the second will move 1 I frame to the left, the third will move 1 I frame to the right and the fourth will move to the very last frame. So just keep selecting good backgrounds and clicking the OK button to make your selection.
MenuShrink - Restoring Original Menus
 To restore your original menus, open the DVD in MenuShrink again and simply click the Restore Backup button. This will paste all the Original files in the MenuShrinkBackup folder into the DVD folder, overwriting the new menus.
Finally
This simple process can help you achieve higher quality on your DVD movies while keeping a menu when you are backing up your DVD to DVDR. Hopefully this method will work perfect for you. If you have any questions or problems please visit our Discussion Forums and ask them there. Make sure you visit the MenuShrink homepage.
Other Guides that may help
After you have completed the MenuShrink process, you should now have a DVD on your HDD with menu's that are a lot smaller than they originally were. If you are wondering how you would go on now to compress it even further to fit on a DVD-R/DVD+R disc, then these guides may help.
Copy entire DVD-9 movie to a single DVD-R using DVD Shrink
Copy full DVD movie disc to a DVDR using CloneDVD
High Quality DVD-9 Backups With DVD Rebuilder & CCE Basic
And if after shrinking your menus you have come out with a DVD that is now under 4.36GB, you no longer need to compress any further, you can now just burn.
Burning pre-authored DVD-Video using Nero
How to burn a DVD-img or DVD folder to DVD with DVDSanta
If you would like to free up more space by cutting out Copyright Notices, FBI Warnings, Trailers, Advertisements, Start/End Credits etc... you can do so with DVDReMake.
Editing a DVD with DvdReMake - Part I
You may find more that interests you at our Guide Section or if you are unfamiliar with some of the Glossary items used in this guide, visit the Glossary Section.
Version History
v3.0 -- 19th April, 2005, Updated guide as program was updated to v2.0 (Dela)
v2.0 -- 4th March, 2005, Updated guide as program was updated to v1.0 (Dela)
v1.0 -- 26th February, 2005, First version online (Dela)
Created: 26 February 2005 Last updated: 25 May 2007
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