Triva question: How did Pre-CSS crack DVD copying work?

[lingyi]

Edit: Not sure if my title change worked or not, it should read "How did Pre-CSS crack DVD copying work?"

Random thought that's been floating around my mind for the past few weeks...how did Pre-CSS crack DVD copying work? I'm sure the answer is somewhere here in the forums, but I seem to recall that it was somehow an internal frame by frame decoding (capture?) that would take days (up to 48-72 hours per disc sticks in my mind) with the disc continually spinning. And how was the audio copied?

I remember experimenting and starting to copy a DVD back then and stopping before it was done (because of stories of burnt out drives due to overuse), but don't remember if there was a partial file or not.

Okay, those braincells are now free to think about something else useless!

[Selur]

It was basically screen + audio capturing, problem back then was to get to the right interfaces and have enough processing power to playback the dvd (using a legal player software) and at the same time capture both audio&video (with a small buffer) and encode to something else. (this was around 1998-2001 in the early days of MPEG-4 ASP)

Nowadays any decent screen capturing tool can do it that way.