DVD Shrink

» see dvdshrink.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

There was a two program routine on a Turkish desktop around 2004 and this was the second half of it. The first program pulled the film off the disc. This one made it fit. A retail film came pressed on a dual layer disc holding 8.5 GB and the blank you had bought in a spindle of fifty held 4.7 GB, and the gap between those two numbers is the whole reason anybody ever downloaded DVD Shrink.

It was freeware for Windows and it was one megabyte. A single executable, no installer worth the name, nobody's brand on it. Nobody has ever put a legal name to the person who wrote it. The site went up at dvdshrink.org and the earliest capture the Internet Archive holds is from 7 June 2003, which is as close to a birthday as this thing has.

What it did was clever in a way that mattered on the hardware people actually owned. Rather than fully decoding the video and encoding it again, it worked on the compressed stream directly and only touched the parts it had to, which meant a full film went through in a fraction of the time a real transcode would have taken. It could push a disc down to around 39 percent of its original size if you let it. You watched a quality slider and decided how much you were willing to lose.

Dual layer blanks did exist by 2004 and they cost several times what a single layer one did, so almost nobody around me bought them. That price gap is the entire reason this program had users. It was not really a piracy tool in the way the industry described it. It was a compression tool that happened to have DeCSS sitting inside it, and the second half of that sentence is what killed it.

~ the dossier ~

~ the postmortem ~

The final builds were 3.2.0.15 in English and 3.2.0.16 in German, both dated 25 July 2004. So development had already been finished for over a year when the letter came, and whoever wrote it appears to have simply stopped rather than announced anything.

On 17 August 2005 the official site was replaced with a line saying it was no more. The web host had been served a DMCA takedown notice, on the grounds that a program which circumvents a copy protection scheme is illegal to distribute in the United States regardless of what the person using it does with it. This was ten weeks after DVD Decrypter went down to a cease and desist from Macrovision. The two halves of the same routine were killed within a summer of each other, by two different companies, using two different legal instruments.

~ what got buried with it ~

Within days the last version was mirrored on every download site that would carry it, and it has never actually been hard to find since. The site came back with a search box where the download link had been, which is the sort of compromise that satisfies a lawyer and nobody else. dvdshrink.org still answers today and still carries the name, but it is not run by whoever wrote the program, and there is a long history of fake builds sold under names like DVD Shrink 2010 that have nothing to do with it.

The part that did not survive is the assumption underneath the whole thing, which is that a film is an object with a size and your job is to make it fit in a smaller object. Nobody has thought about a film that way in fifteen years. There is no spindle of fifty under the desk and no reason to care what 8.5 GB means, and the skill of picking which audio track to throw away so the picture stayed watchable went out with the discs it was built for.

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