MEncoder, FFMPEG, and DVD

OK, so I have some instructional and other non-commercial video DVDs which I thought would be necessary to archive. As a n00b I set out to find any Linux tools which could help with extraction and compressions of DVD filesystems for archival purposes. Since I run GNOME in Debian I was introduced to DVD95, which I found odd as a recommendation because of it's very name. As I did some more research on DVD filesystems (thank you Wikipedia) I found out that most DVDs are written on two layers, just over 8GB, this being DVD 9 format, while single layer DVDs can hold around 4.3GB, that is DVD 5. DVD95 shrinks a DVD9 to DVD5,hence the name DVD95. However, this software wasn't on the Debian repositories so I decided to compile from source.

Installing DVD95 (v1.5p2)

Converts DVD9 (8.4GB) to DVD5 (4.7GB)

wget http://softlayer.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/dvd95/dvd95-1.5p2.tar.gz
tar dvd95-1.5p2.tar.gz
cd dvd95-1.5p2
# As Root install development tools not available from original installation
aptitude install --with-recommends intltool libgnomeui-dev libdvdread-dev libmpeg2-4-dev
./configure
make
# As Root
make install

That was pretty much it. The only problem I had as is noted, was the lack of development libraries which were easy enough to get so ./configure could proceed. According to the INSTALL file for DVD95 it is possible to configure with specific flags, but I had no need for them. So far it's working great.