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Dvd+rw (1 Viewer)

Shea

Stunt Coordinator
Joined
Dec 12, 2002
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125
I'm thinking about getting a DVD burner drive on my computer to make DVD's. Don't really know much about them yet just starting to look into it. I'm wondering if it's even possible to make copies of DVDs I've bought. If possible I'd like to make backups of them but am wondering if they are copy protected against that?
 

Thomas Newton

Senior HTF Member
Joined
Jun 16, 1999
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Thomas Newton
Most commercial DVDs are scrambled, and all consumer DVD recorders/drives/blanks are crippled, to prevent you from making working copies.

DVD burners are useful if you need to back up lots of data (e.g., 20+ GB of 35mm negative scans of family photos), or if you want to create DVD-Videos of photos and home videos.
 

Brian Ruth

Supporting Actor
Joined
Jun 21, 2002
Messages
563
Shea:

Thomas is right. Practically all consumer DVDs have encoding on them designed to prevent you from copying them either to tape or to DVD.

Also, most commercial DVDs are dual-layer, which means they have about 9 GB of storage on them instead of 4.7. This means that even if you WERE successful in descrambling the signal, it would take 2 DVDs to record most of them without compression. To fit a 9GB DVD onto a 4.7GB DVD, one would have to compress it, thus losing quality.

Certain retail products that promise to copy DVDs (Their names shall be witheld here due to forum restrictions) neglect to mention the spreading over 2 DVDs. If you're at all a video purist, you will not want your movies either split or compressed.

I think regardless, this forum is not really the place to discuss this sort of thing. I think the post may already be in danger of violating forum rules. There are certainly many other places to discuss this sort of thing freely, so you may want to try elsewhere if you're still curious.
 

Shea

Stunt Coordinator
Joined
Dec 12, 2002
Messages
125
Na, I just wanted to ask because I didn't really know. But I figured that was the way it was. I don't care of going to the trouble of splitting DVDs up or doing anything illegal.
 

Christ Reynolds

Senior HTF Member
Joined
May 6, 2002
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3,597
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CJ
dvdrhelp is the place to go for this sort of stuff. huge forums, many members, but dont expect the forum to be as organized as the htf, or the members (in general) to act as civilized. other than that, they have an extensive and informative site.

CJ
 

Gary Neuwirth

Stunt Coordinator
Joined
Jun 30, 1997
Messages
50
Go to the dvd help site. I make backup copies of my region 2 dvds I have bought from Japan. Main thing I do is make them region free so that they can play on my non-region free player.

Also I recommend getting a dual burner (+/-).
 

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