How To Copy DVD Movies

There may be many reasons why you'd want to make a copy of a DVD. One thing is DVD discs don't last forever. They get scratched and damaged even in normal use and even if you leave it alone a DVD will deteriorate over time. It's hard to find accurate data but most sources agree that in real life CDs and DVDs won't last as long as the manufacturers would have you believe.

Anyway, if you're reading this, chances are you have a good reason to want to know how to copy a DVD. So let's get on with it.

Copying a DVD - The Problems

Different formats. Most commercially produced movie DVDs are in fact DVD-9 discs which contain more data than the standard DVD-R disc can hold. Thus direct copying is typically impossible because the movie simply won't fit on the writable DVD. The solution is to "transcode" the movie making it smaller. There are various applications that can do that (more on this later).

Copy protection. Most commercial DVD movies are encrypted, scrambled and otherwise protected to prevent anyone from copying them. For a long time the most popular solution was to use a program called DVD Shrink, which could both decode the video, compress it to fit on a DVD-R and burn a DVD (with help of other programs). However, DVD Shrink hasn't been updated for a long time and can't handle modern copy-protection mechanisms. There's still a way though.

How To Copy Any DVD Movie

1. Download and install AnyDVD. It's a driver that will remain in background and transparently decode any DVD you put in your computer. Other programs will see the DVD as if it had no copy protection or encryption, making it easy to copy the disc. It also has many other features but the best part is that AnyDVD is updated regularly so it can recognize most protection schemes and remove them.

2. Copy the DVD using any software you want. There are many possibilities -

• Nero Recode, part of Nero 7 software pack. Very easy to use and well known in the industry, but it's a commercial application (with a trial version available).
• DVD Shrink (+ some tutorials that explain how to copy DVD movies). With the encryption neutralized, DVD Shrink can again copy any disc, plus it's freeware. Note that you will need another application to burn the copy; DVD Shrink can use Nero and some other programs to do this automatically. You can find details on the site.
• Clone DVD (+ a tutorial). Another popular application written by the same people who made AnyDVD. This one is shareware.
  

It doesn't matter which of these you use to copy DVDs - all will work. However, some may be faster or more easy to understand for you. For example, I like the interface of Nero Recode but I've heard CloneDVD is more stable and the DVDs created with CloneDVD work better in home DVD players. It's your choice - you can try some of the applications I mentioned or find something else entirely.

That's the basic stuff you need to know about how to copy a DVD. Well, there are other types of DVDs (like games or data discs) that you might need to backup, but that's a topic for another post ;)

How To Burn iTunes Movies to DVD

Today I saw an interesting post on a forum about how to to burn protected iTunes movies and TV shows to a DVD. That would allow you to view the videos on your own home DVD player and TV.

The trick is getting rid of the "Digital Rights Management" protection of iTunes movies and converting them to a file format that can be used by DVD burner software. As the author of the post said :

What you need to do just two steps:
1. Remove DRM from iTunes purchased movie/TV show to unprotected WMV formats;
2. Burn the non-protected movie to DVDs.

It occurs to me that even the first step could be very useful if you simply don't want to depend on iTunes for viewing your purchased & downloaded videos and have no intention to burn them to a DVD. Personally I prefer to view my videos in the BSPlayer video player (though I use an old version that has no adware and useless features).

Anyway, here's the link to the tutorial - how to burn DVD - iTunes movies. The instructions are a bit sketchy, but you should be OK.