Merging 1.4gb mini's to 1 4.7gb

[vw56german]

Hello all, I am looking for suggestions on what options I have for merging 1.4 mini's on to a dvd5. I have a friend who just got her new camcorder that uses the little dvd's and she has asked me to help her back them up to dvd5's. From what I have discovered so far, the dvd structure seems to be .vob's, .bup's and .ifo's pretty normal. The book that came with the cam said it was outputing Mpeg2's. I did a test last night and I could use Decrypter to rip the files to my hard drive, I also tried recode and could make a 1:1 back up without any problem. Each dvd has its own menu for navigation, and I cant decide what I should do about that. I want to fit 3 discs on to each dvd5 and I can do that by merging the titles in recode, but the result would be a menuless movie. If I used one of the tools for creating a menu I guess that would give me jumps to each disc's data, if I merged the titles on each disc. Can menus be "nested"? Meaning can I retain the original menu for each disc and create a main menu to jump to each of the 3 disc's?

I know I am kind of rambling, and thinking out loud. Just looking for suggestions on possible ways to handle this task.

Thanks in advance for any insight you can provide.

David

[benbryant]

You should use DVDRemake Pro which can help you combine up to 4 DVDs keeping original menus, languages,...Unfortunately, this tool is not available for free. For more information, please check from the link below:

http://www.dimadsoft.com/dvdremakepro/ht_merge_full.php

Regards

[drfsupercenter]

If you don't need a menu, use DVD Shrink in Re-Author mode

Guide:

http://www.dvdshrink.info/compilation.php

--EDIT--

Just saw benbryant's post, DVD Remake Pro is good but not free. If you do not have menus, which I don't think cameras make, the DVD Shrink way is just as good. Plus, it shrinks them too

You can keep all the audio and subtitles (not that there is gonna be multi audio or subtitles on a home video camera)

It also keeps chapter points, should there be any.

--EDIT 2--

You wanted menus, looking at the original post? If you don't mind making homemade menus, try Tsunami DVD Author, which has a great 30 day free trial. That makes a menu for you, just not the original. I am not sure what the camera menus make but they probably don't look all that more different than what you can make in TDA.

As far as subtitles go, TDA doesn't keep them but you wouldn't have subtitles on a video camera's DVD.