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HOW TO COPY A DVD TO DISK
First, please understand that copying a commercial DVD may be illegal, depending
on what country you live in and what you do with the copy. Copying video for
your own personal use may be legal, but making copies of copyrighted discs for
friends is not.
Second, be aware that almost all DVD movies are protected from casual copying.
However, any protection measure is usually broken, .
Third, realize that many movies come on dual-layer discs (DVD-9s), which can
only be directly copied on a dual-layer recordable drive. Some of the copying
software below can recompress the video to fit on a single-layer recordable
DVD, but the picture quality will suffer.
Fourth, understand that simply copying the computer files from a DVD to a recordable
DVD often produces a disc that won't play in a set-top DVD player, since the
files have to go in specific order and specific places on the disc. Some DVD
writing software recognizes the files and places them correctly, but other software
doesn't. In other words, you can't just copy the .IFO and .VOB files.
If you have a legitimate need to copy a DVD, such as a disc you made yourself,
there are a number of options. A variety of computer programs can copy copy
entire discs using a single recordable DVD drive. There are also computer software
utilities you can use to extract video and audio from a disc, which you can
then use to make a new disc. Alternatively you can hook a DVD player to a set-top
DVD video recorder (although in many cases the recorder will detect the Macrovision
or CGMS signal from the player and refuse to record). Some DVD authoring software
can import video from an unprotected disc..
Beware of e-mail and ads touting DVD copying software for sale. below.
DVD copying software:
* Can copy CSS-protected movies (which is illegal because of the DMCA)
Ripping DVD
Almost every DVD disc is encrypted nowadays which prevents you from simply
dragging and dropping its contents to your hard disk. There are several tools
available which can easily bypass this problem simply by decrypting the DVD's
contents. The most popular tools for this job are SmartRipper and DVD Decrypter.
Both tools are extremely easy to use so we won't go into detail on how you
can decrypt you DVDs. For this article we used SmartRipper to rip the entire
DVD to our hard disk using the program's File Mode (in this mode SmartRipper
will simply rip and decrypt all the files on the DVD).
(by Jim Taylor / videodiscovery.com & Dennis)
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