What to do with two main movie titles?

I am trying to backup a movie that has an alternative ending. In "movie only" mode, CloneDVD displays two titles, one is 1:36 the other is 1:37. Title 2 is automatically selected (being the longest?). If I select BOTH titles, the compression rate only drops a few percent. So I figure the two titles shares the same data except from the alternative ending, and that I might as well select both since nothing is gained in quality from leaving one out. Is this correct?

As far as I can remember you are correct - especially as you say it only drop a few %. You may have to preserve menus so that you can switch between the 2 though.

I also have some DVDs with up to 4 main titles with identical length! No alternate ending... How come is that??

cfp999

What is the movie?
By default CloneDVD always selects the longest title.
I always preserve the menu's and on a few rare occasions, CloneDVD has selected the wrong one (longer) and the menu did not work. I went back in and selected the shorter one (by about 1 min) and it worked fine.
This is using the movie only mode, and checking the preserve menu's.

If you say you only loose a few percent by selecting both, then take that safe route.

If you have a DVD R\W disk you can experiment and try doing one at a time with preserve menu's and see if they both work. If the longer title fails, the shorter one was the right choice for that particular movie.
After each test, erase the DVD, it will cost you nothing but your time.

I havent seen a 4 main title movie, but the few Ive seen with 2, one was widescreen format and the other fullscreen. I always picked widescreen, since picking both usually bumped the compression way to high.

I've seen a number of dvd's with multiple main movie titles which are multiple "angles". Most of the time, if you select both, it has no impact on the compression. As someone already suggested, this says the addiitonal title takes no space, and is sharing the video frames in the other title.
Sometimes these multiple angles are related to language selections and represent video frames of credits or titles in something other than the primary language of the video. These do take up sapce, but very little.
Unfortunately, if you include both of them in CloneDVD2, it treats it as 2 titles to be played, and will immediately start the movie over again after playing the 1st title.

No, I don't think you are right. CloneDVD does handle multi angles correctly, I tried it with some Star Wars movies a while ago.

The danish DVD "anklaget" for example has 4 main titles, identical in length.
No WS or FS nor multiangles though...

But it is right that selecting the 4 or only on doesn't make a difference in the "quality bar"....


It is just weird

This is indeed possible. Different titles in one title set can share the video material to save space. Maybe these titles are slightly different, maybe not.