COPYING DVD MOVIES

Copying DVD films that you buy from shops is a bit of a grey area, there is unlikely to be any problem unless you start trying to sell them or give them to people. There could be many legitimate reasons you would want to copy a DVD, you may have your Wedding recorded on DVD.

Of course anything that you own the rights to, you can copy and distribute as you wish.

DVD’s are not cheap, actually they’re very expensive. DVD’s are much more susceptible to damage than we were lead to believe, they suffer from scratches and finger prints. You may want to copy your DVD’s so that you don’t have to risk damaging the originals.

So how do you go about copying DVD’s, well if the DVD you want to copy is a shop brought DVD then it’s likely to have some form of copy protection. You will need two pieces of software to bypass such copy protection:

1. DVD Copying Software.
2. DVD Copy Protection Removal Software.

You can either search around for some Freeware Programs to do this job, or you can spend money to buy the very best Tools available. We will investigate both options in this Guide.

DVD Movies are normally Dual-Layer Discs (DVD-9), now although the Technology is available for Dual-Layer DVD Writers, and many Writers support it, the actual Dual-Layer Media is very expensive.

Most of the Media you will buy for your writer will be Single Layer (DVD-5), due to this less space is available on the Disc and so something from the original Movie must be lost.

DVD Movies often come with additional extras, you can select to only copy the main feature film, so saving space and allowing it to fit onto the Disc. Many of the Software Solutions are also able to Compress the DVD Movies so they take up less space (although quality will suffer).

Copying a DVD with Freeware Software is no longer a complicated task, dvdshrink can Copy directly to DVD as long as you have Nero installed, it probably came with your DVD burner!

1. Download DVD Shrink Software from www.dvdshrink.org.
2. Install DVD Shrink following the Onscreen Instructions.
3. Run DVD Shrink.
4. Put the source DVD in your DVD Reader.
5. Click the open Disc button.
6. Navigate to select your DVD. DVD Shrink will analyse your DVD.
7. Select Re-author.
8. Double click the “Main movie” to see the separate Titles.
9. Drag the Titles to your re-author screen.
10. Click on the compression settings tab and select “Automatic”.
11. Deselect the Audio Streams that you do not want, if you only want English, then only leave English selected.
12. Click the Backup button.
13. Select your DVD writer as the destination drive.
14. Click DVD region tab and select region free to ensure your DVD will play on any player.
15. Click start to start the encoding process.
16. DVD Shrink notifies you when it’s completed.

If quality is a major concern of yours then you can even cut out the Credits to reduce the Video time, and so increase the amount of space left on your Disc. To do this at step 9 click the start/end frames button.

If you have any problems with the Copy Protection on DVD’s then you can install extra Software such as slysoft’s anydvd. Some DVD manufacturers place dummy sectors on the Discs to prevent people from copying them, these make the recorder throw up an error.

It is possible to bypass this by using two pieces of Software:

1. Download and install DVD Decrypter.
2. Download Ripit4me.
3. Run Ripit4me (it does not need installing).
4. Click the wizard mode button.
5. Select DVD drive, and select where you want to save the DVD (on your hard drive).
6. Click create PSL.
7. Click “Rip just the movie” and select “Rip DVD”.
8. DVD decrypter automatically starts.
9. Select the files you want to copy to a new DVD.
10. Click “Do it” to get Ripit4me to remove the dummy sectors.
11. Select Open with DVD shrink.

This process should manage to copy around 99% of the DVD’s you own.

There is a lot of paid Software available that is updated on a regular basis. The benefit with Software you buy is that it’s often a lot easier to use.

Return from Copying DVD Movies - to - DVD Burning Homepage