Can you copy a protected Film from DVD to DVD

[Barny]

Hi

Have asked this question before, but failed to get an answer, so heres hoping I have more luck this time, LOL.

Is there any software that anyone knows of that allows you to copy a DVD film ( with protection ) to a blank DVD.

I'm thinking of buying a DVD burner now the prices have dropped, also the media has got cheaper as well. But it would be pointless to purchase if I cannot copy the latest DVD films.

I know there is no Clone DVD ( yet ) but is there anything else out there that will do a one to one copy including protection ?

Thanks

[Darkbird]

You cannot write the content scrambling codes to a DVD-R General (consumer) disc, so a perfect clone of a protected DVD video is impossible. That's why the DVD Forum designed the formats in the manner they did. i.e. to prevent copying.

However, you can duplicate the movie contents with the help of one of the various descarmblers. If the total size of the files on the DVD is less than 4,700,000,000 bytes then it's a piece of cake to put the files on a DVD-R. But, a lot of movies (most?) are larger than that size, so you either have to re-encode the video to a lower bitrate and reauthor the disc or edit the video into multiple parts and reauthor the movie onto two (or more) DVD-R's. The effort is more than most people would want to go thru just to get a copy of a movie on DVD-R.

[Barny]

Thanks for the reply Darkbird.
So if you used one of the descarmblers to duplicate the movie would you still have the menu, added scenes and the like ?
How long does it take to do an average film on a high end PC ?
And lastly, is the quality at the end of it as good as the original ?
Thanks in advance for the info.

[JJamez]

No, you would only have the video files without menus.

You would have to reauthor the DVD and recreate the menus manually. If thats something you'd enjoy doing, as I and many people here do for some strange reason , it can be an arduous and tedious process...

As darkbird said, if you're just copying and descrambling the video files (.vob) from the DVD and not recompressing them, the time involved is negligable (not including the reauthoring time, which again can take awhile depending on their complexity).

If you're DVD files are too big for a DVD-R and you need to compress, the time increases depending on the program and settings you use. On a high end PC, figure anywhere from 6 to 20 hours depending on settings (usually done overnight or when you're at work/school/whatever).

As for quality, thats the good news. Without recompression, the quality will be exactly the same. Even with recompression you probably won't notice any degradation - the bigger the files you begin with, the more compression you use to fit them on a DVD-R, the more quality you lose. But again, you most likely will not be able to see any difference. If you're squeezing movies onto CD-R's on the other hand (VCD/SVCD), you WILL see degradation, although I must admit some of the 3 CD SVCD's I've made look PRETTY damn good.

[AntnyMD]

Doesnt it take, like, a year to burn a fully loaded DVD-R?

[alkieman]

Actually, takes about an hour to burn a full 4.7Gb disc

[Darkbird]

Half an hour burning time for a full DVD-R at 2x speed.

The Pioneer drive only does DVD-RW (rewritable) discs at 1x speed so those take twice as long.

[thxkid]

Just thought I would pass this along, APEX DVD Player at Sams club model 660 sells for $119, On the net their are places that offer downloads so you can flash the firmware on this DVD to remove the macrovision. This then would require you to play the DVD back to your computer through a MPEG2 capture card to make a safety backup copy of the DVD you are playing.