To copy or not to copy...

[pcspinheiro]

I was wondering if any of you guys knows how I can make the CD´s I burn myself impossible to be copied. Well, I would´t say impossible, because that´s... impossible, but at least less prone to be copied (copy protected), to prevent people from making copies of them.

Thanks in advance!!!

[pocholin]

Scratch the reading surface, that should make it impossible to copy.

Side efect: it will make it impossible to read as well.

)

[ktnwin]

pocholin's method is THE only way.

Typically, CD is protected by injecting defects into a few sectors (that the CD, or the associated software does not really care about).
Most CD writer software choke on those bad sectors because they don't know that those sectors are really don't care.

Nero has an option to ignore those bad sectors and just going copying the rest. Therefore the new copy works just like the original (without any bad sectors but no one care).

[mijman]

Before I knew better, I used NTI cd maker pro to make VCDs.
But, standard VCD compliance would produce VCDs which were horribly garbled audio and video.
I accidently discovered that if I re-encoded it, using the cut/paste section of TMPGenc, using the default "MPG system stream" then those discs played perfectly on my standalone.

The side effect was that the discs were not able to be read or copied by any computer, even the one that made them. I can get a directory, but any attempt to access the .DAT files fails.

I'm not even sure why my Sampo plays them, since it is, in essence, a DVDrom drive in it. I considered doing this all the time so people couldn't copy my stuff, but not everybody watches VCDs in a standalone.