I recently found some films on the internet that come as a 4.7GB stack of VOB files. They’re DVD images, that can be burnt following the simple process:

mkdir -p dvd/VIDEO_TS
mv * dvd/VIDEO_TS
mkisofs -dvd-video -udf -o dvd.iso dvd/
growisofs -Z /dev/cdrom=dvd.iso

Now, what do we do when we find 8GB DVD images? The easy way out is probably to buy 8GB DVDs and the appropriate burner. The other way is to shrink the DVD.

Windows has a nice utility called DVDShrink. But it’s for Windows only. Linux has vamps. It’s better. Vamps will resize a VOB file by any factor, thus letting you shrink the DVD image. Supposing we need to shrink the DVD to half its size, the previous commands become:

mkdir -p dvd/VIDEO_TS
for f in `ls *.VOB`; do vamps -e 1.5 < $f > dvd/VIDEO_TS/$f; done
cp -u * dvd/VIDEO_TS
mkisofs -dvd-video -udf -o dvd.iso dvd/
growisofs -Z /dev/cdrom=dvd.iso