How can one tell if a DVD is 9 or 5?

Please forgive me if this question has been asked&answered already, I looked around but could not find anything. Anyhow I'm a week away from receiving my Pioneer A05 and am scouring the forums and dl'ing all necessary software. My question is that I've been using DVD2SVCD for awhile now and have never came across any issues about whether or not a movie I was backing up was DVD9 or 5. But after having visted several forums about backing up my DVD's with a DVD burner the question has been raised about DVD9 recorded movies and fitting them onto a DVD5 disk. I realize that what they are concerned with it trying to fit all the extras, like real working menu's. However is it possible to just rip and record the movie portion with 5.1 Dolby or DTS(SVCDS only allow stereo) and leave the extras wayside? Thank you for your patience.

Yes it is very easy to rip just the movie, and dd sound, from a dvd-9 and then burn to a dvd-r (5). However you when you encounter a dvd-9 movie, that even after you have riped out all the extra features and unwanted audio etc it is still greater than 4.35GB you will then have to re-encode or cut the movie. How to tell if a movie is a dvd-9 or dvd-5? Pop it in your dvd drive and load up the latest version of dvd-decrypter. If it has one layer it is a dvd-5, if it has 2 layers it is a dvd-9.

Got it! 

yes that is also possible, but the guide in doom9's site seems too complicated to me... i usually rip the whole DVD then use ifoedit to strip unwanted audio and subtitles. usually when the movie is 90 minutes long, i can record it without having to re-encode the sucker.

it looks to me like you've missed the correct guide: entitled "How to keep only the main movie of a DVD" Other guides may look simpler because they don't cover as many details.. maybe you can get away with those.. but every now and then you'll run into a case where it's the little details that makes the difference and that's the point where other sites will leave you stranded without help. Of course you may not care what your DVD contains, or about user option prohibitions... then just skip that section. And when it suddenly doesn't work or there's something on the DVD that shouldn't be there you'll remember the skppped section , go back, and find your fix for the problem.