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Since EBCDIC · May 19, 2003, 04:33 PM

The kids are fingering that Wallace & Gromit DVD we bought, and I'm worried that it'll soon get fatally scratched.

I have a SuperDrive, and I understand there's a difference between Authoring and General DVD burners, but I'm not sure whether the difference means that I can't burn a back-up of this DVD and use it instead of the original.

If I can't burn a one-for-one copy, would someone please recommend the next best thing; perhaps transmogrifying the video into a slightly smaller size so that it'll fit onto a 4.7 GB DVD?

I thank you, and my kids thank you.

P · May 19, 2003, 05:26 PM

Most DVDs you buy in a store are encoded with a key - the disc key. This disc key is written several times onto the disc in turn encoded with different keys - player keys, some 160 or so I think. When you buy a license to manufacture a DVD player, you get a player key, which can be used to get the disc key from any disc.

So why not just copy all those keys along with the data on the disc, you say? Because those keys have to be written into a special area on the disc that you burn, and on any disc you buy that area is already written binary zeroes to. If you record a disc yourself, you don't encode it and the disc key is thus zero and so it works anyway, but a binary copy won't work.

What you have to do is to use a program like DeCSS or similar to crack the encoding, get the decoded files onto your HD and then burn them back in clear. I'm not going to link to DeCSS, because I don't want to get they thread locked, but let's just say that Google is your friend. The second choice from the top is a good one.

An alternative version, if you have a fast network connection, is to use a program like mldonkey or Acquisition to download a copy of the movie from the 'net.

gthyb · May 19, 2003, 05:34 PM

Yeah, that guy didn't tell you anything.

look for two programs. one called DVDBackup and the other called DVD2oneX. you'll need toast to burn the image it creates, though.

OpenStep · May 19, 2003, 05:55 PM

I've copied a couple dvd movies by just running toast, saving the dvd as an image and burning it back. Worked for me on a couple as long as they were't double layer 8+ GB dvd's.

Mediaman_12 · May 19, 2003, 06:41 PM

Originally posted by gthyb:
Yeah, that guy didn't tell you anything.

You even left out the main problem concerning 'Shop bought' DVD's.
The thing is that most 'commercial' DVD's are Miulti Layered. So they can fit the entire Movie and all the extras on one disk. Home burners on the other hand can only burn single layer DVD's, so even if you could do a 'Disk Copy' you couldn't fit the entire 'commercial' DVD on to one DVD-R.
The programs mentioned (DVD2oneX and DVDBackup) allow you to rip the full DVD to your hard disk, then strip out any bits you don't want, to enable you to squeeze just the Movie on to a DVD-R disk.