dvd-9 --> dvd-5 backup with divx/ without wine

[Matt Price <matt.price@utoronto.ca>]

Hi folks,

My 3-year-old has recently gotten in the habit of smashing his dvd's
into our dvd player -- a practice which i am trying to discourage
without much luck...  In lieu of better parenting, I am trying to back
up our dvd's using my dvd-burner.  Most of these are dual-layer dvd-9 (8+
gigabytes) and I only have single-layer dvd-5 (4.7g) discs, so I need
to do some kind of re-encoding.  My dvd player claims to support Divx
and Mpeg4, so I was *hoping* to do the following: 

- backup to hd with:
dvdbackup -v 2 -M -i/dev/hdd -o/outputdir

- transcode the individual VOB files to divx
- create a dvd with: 
growisofs -dvd-compat -Z /dev/hdd -dvd-video /outputdir

I've hunted around a bit and I don't see a well-documented
comprehensive solution to this problem.  so my question:

- is it actually possible to make a dvd file system using divx video
files, or am I missing the boat somehow? If I *am* barking up the
wrong tree, what solutions do other people use to make a dvd-9 to
dvd-5 backup?  I have seen several tools described: lxdvdrip;
dvdrip;xdvdshrink;and drip.  I'hve had problems with all of these:

-drip segfaults;
-xdvdshrink doesn't allow multiple audio tracks (so commentaries can't
be ripped) and seems to havetrouble with subtitles;
- I'm not entirely sure what lxdvdrip is supposedto be doing -- I ran
it successfully, but the resulting directory  was rather smaller than I
expected & I'm not sure how to generate an iso from it;
- dvdrip almost always freezes up my user interface & in any case,
once it's finished ripping the files don't appear to have been
transcoded and I can't tell what precisely I'm meant to do next.  

anyway, I would really appreciate any hints folks have or links to
useful howtos.  thanks,

matt


--------------------------
 .''`.       Matt Price 
: :'  :      Debian User
`. `'` 	     & hemi-geek
  `-     
--------------------------