[apollyon]

My first DVD burner was in a Toshiba laptop I used only with the isntalled OS WinXP (using at home my Linux box).

I recently purchased a DVDRW for my Linux box and I'm not sure what programs are available that can compress video for copying a 8GB DVD to the 4.7GB DVDRs.

There are many programs that can convert DVD video into DivX, AVI, etc. but are there ones that will shrink vobs as vobs and leave in menus, etc.?

[TiddlyPom]

Just in case you haven't come across them before, the site to try first (IMHO) is http://www.videohelp.com/tools?s=23#23

This is a fairly comprehensive list of video manipulation tools available under Linux.

For ripping a DVD and making a backup copy you can use DVD::RIP http://www.exit1.org/dvdrip/

For general video editing then Cinelerra http://heroinewarrior.com/cinelerra.php3 takes some beating (and I can run it on my 1.2GHz/512Mb RAM Athlon system without any problems).

For authoring your own DVDs then you can use 'Q DVD Author' http://qdvdauthor.sourceforge.net/

Another good alternative is DVDStyler http://dvdstyler.sourceforge.net/index.html

There are plenty of other links at VideoHelp as well

[martouf]

the three tools I'm aware of are:
mencode, transcode, and dvd::rip

Linux Journal has had some very good articles on this topic.

Read these articles all the way through, and make special note of the "resources" links
at the end of the articles:

DVD Authoring

Making Digital Movies on Linux

and
DVD Transcoding with Linux Metacomputing
pay extra attention to the 'Background', 'DVD Partitioning', and 'Test Bed Layout' sections.