Copying Discs!

[mattyarmy]

Hi, sorry if this is in the wrong section of the forum - I'm new to all this!

I just bought a DVD+R/RW drive and I wanted to make a copy of some DVDs which are already on DVD-R. These work in my DVD player fine, but when I copied them to the DVD+R I used DVD X-Copy to extract the video from the DVD-R then copied it to a +RW. This didn't work in my DVD player. So I tried with a +R. The same thing happened it just says loading on the DVD. However they play fine on the PC if you run Win DVD.

Where am I going wrong? Would I be better using a program to just do a 1 to 1 copy? If so which one? I got Nero 5.5.10 with the player but if there's a piece of software I should buy to make life easier for myself I'll consider it money well spent! Also can I amend either of the two discs I have burned with any program to make them work?

Sorry to be a pest, I hope you can help.

Thanks a lot for your time.

MATT

[miketree]

Are you sure your dvd player will play dvd+R/W media?

[mattyarmy]

I guess so. It plays DVD-R, I thought that +R played in the majority of DVD players. Its a Samsung DVD-S224. Would you say I would be better with a DVD-R recorder? I only got the +R because someone told me that they both played in about 90% of set top players.

[miketree]

Hmm - should play OK on that.

[mkelley]

If these are already burned disks (DVDR) then I would *not* use DVDXCopy for them -- for one thing, DXC uses it's own burning routines (and/or invokes others) and that's not always good. For another thing -- you don't need it, since you don't need to compress and/or split the disk.

All you need to do is fire up Record Now (which came with your Sony drive) and select the two directories on that DVDR called VIDEO_TS and AUDIO_TS. Either copy them to your hard drive first (if you have the room and only the one DVD drive) or drag them over from the other DVD drive. Use the settings on Record Now to burn a data disk (don't use the wizard) and make sure it's set to close the disk after burning (in options -- this should be by default and a warning should come up if it's not set). Then burn and I'll bet you everything will be fine.

As long as Record Now sees those two directories in the root of the DVDR it will create it as a DVD that can be played on an external player (software players are a LOT more forgiving about these things).

[mattyarmy]

Thanks for the advice, I've since had a play round and managed to confuse myself even more! I used my friend's copy of Easy CD Creator 6 to make a 1:1 copy and it worked! The disc was a DVD+RW and the source only had VIDEO_TS directory on it, which was all that was copied. Now my destination DVD has this and no AUDIO_TS, which seems to be fine in my standalone DVD. Oh well I got there in the end, thanks for your help! I just wish I understood what went wrong.

Thanks again!

[diablos_blade]

Its not just you - i learnt to hard way a while ago that 1:1 copies of dvdr's don't seem to work no matter what burning program you use. I now just copy all files of the dvdr to a folder on my hard drive and then use nero to write them back as dvd video files. Never failed me yet and it should work with other prog's such as Easy Cd/dvd crerator etc. DVDXCopy probably messed up because it was more than likely trying to decrypt the already decrypted source.....

[mkelley]

Thanks for the advice, I've since had a play round and managed to confuse myself even more! I used my friend's copy of Easy CD Creator 6 to make a 1:1 copy and it worked! The disc was a DVD+RW and the source only had VIDEO_TS directory on it, which was all that was copied. Now my destination DVD has this and no AUDIO_TS, which seems to be fine in my standalone DVD. Oh well I got there in the end, thanks for your help! I just wish I understood what went wrong.

Thanks again!

You don't *necessarily* need an AUDIO_TS folder, but some standalones will refuse to play a DVD without one. It's always empty (apparently it was designed for the music only DVD -- what a great hit that's been!) and always a good idea to include it.

Making a 1:1 copy should work properly because that's all it is... just a 1:1 copy. But you can never go wrong with making sure both the AUDIO_TS and VIDEO_TS folders are on a disk and doing a burn as data because most burning programs will correctly recognize this as a DVD and operate appropriately.

Anyway, glad you got it to work -- now you know what to do next time.