[vutenor]

I'm thinking about buying a new powerbook with the superdrive. Does the DVD burner work like a CD burner? Can you burn copies of DVD movies or are commercial DVDs protected and unable to copy? I'm wondering because in college, people pass around burned CDs all the time, but I've never seen a copied DVD movie. Thanks.

[edavis]

The DVD burner "works like" the CD burner, in that you insert the media and click "burn". You can't copy movie DVD's though, at least not directly. 1) they have copyprotection schemes built in them, and 2) most commercial DVD's either contain much more than the 4.7GB that the the media supports, or they have some funky compression scheme that a home computer does not match.

[k_munic]

Originally posted by vutenor:
I'm thinking about buying a new powerbook with the superdrive. Does the DVD burner work like a CD burner? Can you burn copies of DVD movies or are commercial DVDs protected and unable to copy? I'm wondering because in college, people pass around burned CDs all the time, but I've never seen a copied DVD movie. Thanks.

in some countries, e.g. Germany, copying even legally owned commercial dvds is a crime, so i just describe a technical possibilty:

step1
you have to copy the dvd on your hd and remove any copy-protection. existing prgs doing so are DVDbackup and OseX... you have to find out where to track a version read the including manuals!

step2
you have to downsize the datas, as mentioned before.
best & fastest prg yet is dvd2x, shareware. it lets you copy a whole dvd (with subtitels, extras a.s.o.) in a lower pic quality (remember: a commercial dvd is double layered, so 9Gigs, a dvd-r is just 4,4gigs) or the just movie in brilliant quality (really!)

step3
burn the new VIDEO_TS folder (plus an empty AUDIO_TS) with toast on a dvd-r

step4
there is no step 4.............

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Plan B:
after copying your legally owned dvd on your hd, it is possible to make a s-vcd of it - good quality, very cheap cd-r! search at versiontracker for "dvd" or "svcd"... time-consuming, tricky... a dvd-r costs 2$ - so why?