planning to purchase no-solder board for my ps2 to play back-ups for both cd-r and dvd's. Do I need a game shark for this? Also, can I back-up dvd movie with a cd-r disk w/o too much of a video loss, or should I back-up on dvd disks?

Depends on the chip you are installing, but most of them require some sort of boot method, as far as dvd movies are concerned. do them on dvd disks if you can.
Ray:)

I don't know if that VCD player that everyone was talking about came out or not (waste of money if you ask me), but you should go with DVDRs. Unless you use DIVX or MPEG-4 for DVD backup then there's no real point in using CDR (you can probably tell that I'm not a VCD person).