Okay, in the for what it's worth department, posted without any understanding of the difference in these types of files on my part, I want to call your attention to a handy little free program that works wonders to shift regions and record DVDs. It has to be downloaded from offshore (telling you something about its legality in the US, because U.S. places can't even link to it, so I won't either) but it works great. (I am going to use "*" in the name here. I don't want search engines coming to Mudcat if someone on the outside goes looking for this program by name.) Here is a link that those in the U.S. will find helpful: Follow the first unsponsored link in this TinyURL link.

This program breaks the copy process into a couple of steps, so it isn't the direct copy that various DVD burner programs balk at. The disk to be copied is analysed and copied to your hard drive. It uses Nero technology, and I understand there are a number of Nero partial programs that can be downloaded for free or test for a period of time. I have a full Nero program so never had to fool with that part. Once the disk has loaded, the second stage is to burn it. I think you might be able to follow the directions below to set up the files the way you want, then close out the program, go back in via Windows Explorer, and tell your regular burning software to copy those files to the DVR.

You start DVD ******, then put your movie in. Click on "Open Disk" and chances are that your computer will offer to open it with your resident viewing program. Cancel that, and DVD ****** will run a tiny "preview" of the scenes of the movie to analyse it. Then you decide how you want to copy it.

You can choose the "Full Disk" button to copy the whole thing with all of the crap the studios put on, the warnings, the menus, the previews, or you can "re-Author" it, which gives you a directory of the disk and you can copy just the movie itself into whatever region (or region free) that you want. The "******" part of the program means it compresses it to put all of that disk onto your DVR. If it has to compress it more than 50-60% then you're going to lose some quality, but you can compensate by letting the program do a deep scan of the disk first and compress it in the least disruptive way possible. Usually if you copy only the movie you get it at 100%, and the result is that when you put the DVD in the player it just starts and plays the movie. Big movies (Gone With the Wind, Lawrence of Arabia) that are on double layer disks won't fare as well as normal flicks when recording to single layer DVD-Rs. If you open the compression settings once you've selected "Re-Author," then you can see the various layers and determine how much you want to leave to get the compression you want. I get rid of bulky French, Spanish, and any the other languages (you want to leave at least one or your movie will have no sound!) and you'll see your percentage compression decrease. At 70 percent and up the compression is not noticeable during playback.

When you have made your choices, you hit the "Backup" button and you'll see another important set of tabs to look at. I choose to burn these to my region (1) because my DVD players don't respond well to region-free settings, though that is the default in this program. Unclick the region free option and it has all of the regions checked. De-check the ones you don't want, and you should in this process be converting the file from whatever region it was filmed for into whatever region your equipment comes from.

You can make good personal copies with this program. It takes 20-30 minutes per disk, and I'd advise keeping it to yourself that you're doing this. Hence the anonymous post here.