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There are a lot of available programs to copy a DVD, such as the famous DVDXCopy (http://www.selldvdxcopy.com/) and the slightly less famous DVD Decrypter (http://www.dvddecrypter.com/). But now, you can go to any Wal-Mart and browse through their dump bin for $5 DVDs. Granted, they're not the new releases, but it's still usually a decent selection for building your DVD collection. And at that price, it's not worth the effort to copy. Box sets, on the other hand, can get quite pricey (such as a season of "Star Trek: TNG" that was selling for around $150 initially)... Those discs get copied, but only so the originals don't get scratched, worn out, etc. It's still too much of a hassle to spend an entire day copying them just for free discs when you can rent them from NetFlix for next to nothing... but it is worth it for protecting your originals if you watch them a lot.

1 Graphics
Sony kept telling us that the PSP was a mini-PS2 in your pocket. Now that we have screen shots and movies we see overly-simple character models with fewer polygons than characters on the PS1 and games that skimp on textures like Wipeout Pure. Thats okay though because on a tiny screen you wont miss the extra polygons or textures. Just buy our crap and I promise well make better looking games in the future. Honest!

2 Battery
Okay, the battery thing isnt an issue. Really! If you are in the middle of a game and the battery runs out, just plop in another $45 battery and keep playing. Just make sure to keep your spares charged and in a huge bag to carry around with your huge game cases and the charger. Also, make sure to save your game cause those rumors you heard about the game being suspended while you swap the battery were spread by Sony fanboys and arent true.

3 - Music playback
Yep! Now you can play music on your PSP. If you dont believe us, check out the great article about it on IGN that gives us the low-down. 1 directory of music with no ID3 tag support to sort on artist/genre/album. No crossfade like your rio Karma so expect a gap between songs. No album art cover or any imaginative use of the huge screen at all. No real EQ settings for bass and treble. Look out iPod, we have the Walkman of the 21 st century here.

4 - Wireless too
The PSP follows in the footsteps of the Nintendo DS showing that you can have fun without wires. Unlike the DS, you have to manually turn on the wireless capabilities or your battery will loose juice like a sieve. It kind of sucks that you cant just automagically find other players and that you have to worry about the battery slipping away faster than the awesome 3-hours than you may already get, but hey, thats progress!

5 - Sleep mode
One of the drawbacks to a disc-based system is load time. To help overcome some of the boot-up and loading time for the PSP, it allows you to put the system on sleep mode with a flick of a button. You wont really need this feature though, since after a short burst of gaming, your battery will need a recharge anyways.

6 - Movie playback.
The PSP plays back MP4-formatted movies, right off the memory stick. Were still working on a way to make this thing less complicated, but right now you need at least a couple pieces of software to make the movie conversion. One is Decrypter, to rip movies off of your DVDs and store them in VOB format files, and in conjunction with that you will need 3GP Converter, a free utility that converts video files to MP4. (really, I dont even need to make fun of this one. It is a joke already. It should be noted though that you can only play 320x240 movies, the same resolution movies my phone already plays. So much for a high-resolution screen since you can only play low-resolution movies on it.)

7 - Strong third-party support.
The PSP should have a huge selection of craptacular 3 rd party games available throughout its short lifespan. 3 rd party support is guaranteed cause Sony does not really make any 1 st party games, but buys other companies to support its own products. You are sure to see games like generic off-road racing PSP, retarded golf simulation that tries to be funny PSP and a shitload of shovelware from the evil EA games. 3 rd party companies are expected to show the greatest support making extra batteries for the PSP that explode in your pocket when they bump your keys.

8 - The price is going to be right
If the unit comes in at the totally reasonable price of $185, like it is in Japan right now, you may be a happy camper. Before you have the register biscuit ring you up, make sure to grab a few added necessities to make playing fun. Memory Card - $49 You dont HAVE to have a memory card, but you really do. Extra Battery - $

Which CD Burner would you recommend?

Category CD/DVD Burning:
Burn4Free - http://www.burn4free.com/ [burn4free.com]
Burnatonce - http://www.burnatonce.com/ [burnatonce.com]
CDBurnerXP - http://hem.bredband.net/cdburnerxp/ [bredband.net]
CDRDAO - http://cdrdao.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]
CDR Tools Frontend - http://demosten.com/cdrfe/ [demosten.com]
Deepburner - http://www.deepburner.com/ [deepburner.com]
DVD Decrypter: http://www.dvddecrypter.com/ [dvddecrypter.com]
Easy Burning, DropCD & Audio CD - http://www.paehl.de/cdr [paehl.de]

I hope the folks who at DVD Decrypter update it so it will strip a DVD of all these cumbersome programs and such also.

Using tools such as DVD Decrypter which can verify the disc after burning will help there, I've been using it with much success for the past 9 months...

DVDDecrypter or DVD Shrink. Rip and burn to ISO or another disc. I use DVD-shrink for dual layered discs and then burn the ISO with DVD Decrypter. If you have a single layer you can just use DVD Decrypter to burn the entire disc without edits.

See here for more information on DVD Shrink.

They are both free and work well.

The DVD burner will be your best investment. As you probably know, Disney movies have 30 minutes of commercials up front and either you can wait until the startup gets to the point where you can actually hit play or you have to hid forward for 5 minutes to skip the commercials.

I would highly suggest you go get a DVD burner really soon, the prices of even a Dual Layer Burner are below a 100 bucks. You can then rip out all those commercials and simply insert the DVD and Walk away and it will play automatically. Download DVD Decrypted and DVD Shrink. You will never touch the originals again. The convenience of a movie playing when you insert the disk is the greatest thing for kids (no waiting no fussing you'll agree).

Several DVDs we've gotten through Netflix have several minutes of trailers you can't skip. All they let you do is hold down the fast forward.

Can anyone recommend a good Open Source / Freeware / Shareware / Paid DVD player that allows you to skip the "unskippable" ads? If I'm not mistaken, the ads are unskippable entirely through contractual implementation requirements, not any technical jiggery.

Personally, I've just been ripping the raw files to disk with DVD Decrypter, and just watching the movie portions, but it would be nice to cut out the ripping phase.

Agreed with the 2x rate, 2x rate combined with quality media ::cough::Ritek::cough:: more or less guarantees a burn that will work with most standalone DVD players. I also (with DVD Decrypter) have a 120MB software buffer alongside the 2MB DVD Burner's buffer so I can do other stuff without ruining my burn...

Yes.

Download Page for Daemon Tools.

DVDDecrypter

You need to read a little bit on the dvddecrypter page about how to install it (ie, you may need to download and install a dll or two in addition to the main program) and then you'll use one of the menus to specify an ISO output file. It's pretty straightforward. I also use it to rip audio streams from movies so I can put them on MP3 cds and listen to movies.

Daemon tools is likewise straightforward. After installation, start the program (if it didn't autostart) and a tray icon appears. By default it has one drive (you can enable more) Left click on the icon, select "device 0" and it'll open up a file dialog where you can select the iso file you want to load into the drive. Look in file explorer and there it is.

Command line options are detailed in the help, the one you'll want to use is
daemon.exe -mount 0,"c:\My Images\nameofimage.iso"

-Adam

Use DVD Decrypter to rip to ISOs, removing Macrovision as you do so. Then get Daemon Tools to mount the images. There are a number of good third-party automounting tools with menus, and if you're a programmer you can get the API from the DT developers to make your own. You will, of course, need to install a DVD player app if you don't already have one.

It'll be time-consuming to set this all up, as just the DVD ISOing itself will be a bit long.

You can also try out DVD Decryptor. It can rip DVDs to ISOs directly (and do things like strip out Macrovision in the process). Might save some time from ripping to your HD and then converting the ripped contents to an ISO.

1. Use DVD Decrypter in File mode to rip movies to hard drive/storage area in separate folders. Remove UPOs at same time for convenience.

2. Create a web page on your server which links to each starting VOB in that folder with the name of the movie. Customise as necessary into Genre etc if desired.

3. Associate VOB files with your choice of DVD player software. Set player software to go into fullscreen mode and disable screen sleep.

4. Use remote mouse or whatever with video interface to computer to choose appropriate movie and voila!

You didn't mention whether you were looking to run Linux or Windows or OS X, but I think the principles are the same.

This is a good Windows-only setup using mostly freeware tools:

DVD Decrypter to rip the DVDs to macrovision-free/region-free ISO images

Daemon Tools to mount the isos as virtual drives on demand

MyHTPC as a TV-friendly filesystem shell (in combination with some simple batch scripts to control Daemon Tools, several of which can be found in the MyHTPC forums)

Zoom Player to play the DVDs (it's fast, full-featured, and you can turn off the GUI entirely which is nice on a TV.

You will also want WinDVD: not to play the DVDs, because the interface is so bulky and slow, but because you will need good MPEG-2 codecs and I don't know of any free ones as good as the filters that come with WinDVD. Zoom Player has a feature that automatically finds the codecs and registers them for you. (AC3Filter is a free AC3 audio codec that is comparable to InterVideo's.)

There are loads of ways to do it in OS X and Linux. Somebody who knows better than me is sure to post them.

Check doom9.net for details on this approach... use DVDDecrypter to rip the DVDs as an ISO image, then use Daemon Tools to mount the ISO in a virtual DVD drive. Works perfectly.

Why would it need to burn dual-layer DVDs? Using DVD Decrypter and Pinnacle InstantCopy, you can: 1. rip a DVD to ISO or deCSS-ed format; 2. compress the DVD by re-encoding it or removing parts you don't want; and 3. burn the DVD back to disc. This works with any DVD, single-layered or dual-layered, DVD+/-R, +/-RW.

Can't we just take an image of a DVD like any other media format? Piracy will live on without overpriced software to facilitate it.

They might not be quite as easy to use as DVDXCopy, but they will get the job done.

I think the next time I have to re-activate DVDXcopy because I've upgraded my hardware (again), I'm just going to "activate it myself".

Why bother paying for what you can get for free? DVD Decrypter, DVDStripper, and DVD Shrink will edit out unwanted material and squeeze any movie down to where it'll fit on a DVD-R, and they're all free (as in beer, anyway, which is more than you can say for DVDXcopy).

Well... if you dont have a DeCSSing DVD player, your movies wont play.

These DVD's are like any other:

1) use DVD decrypter (free) to rip
2) use DVDshrink (free) to transcode to DVD5 size
3) use Nero/etc/whatever to burn a UDF disk on a DVD-R

voila.. a copy of about any DVD, with 47 hours left before it rusts

It wasn't until people starting writing GUI/CLI DVD rippers that it became possible. Should they go after them?

This is something I have often wondered myself. The MPAA fights DeCSS so aggressively that they succeed in getting people shut down for putting the code on T-Shirts, yet nice and user friendly programs like DVD Decrypter just seem to be left alone.

Can anyone explain this logic to me?

Can you give more information about CSS - there was nothing on that page that even hinted at it.

Who's key do you use? (there are a fixed number) Is the CSS authoring implemented in software or hardware? Why do they not even mention CSS on the page?

It is not possible to write a CSS key to a General DVD-R (the regular type used with most DVD-R units such as the DVR-A04) since the area the key would be written in (an area similar to the pregroove on a CD-R) is not writable on a General DVD-R.

Authoring DVD-R discs, however, can have anything written to them, including CSS keys. This is accomplished using software such as Scenarist (proof of CSS here, under DVD-Video Specification Support).

However, this doesn't entirely stop piracy -- even though all DVD-R discs are all single-layer (so if you're mastering a dual-layer DVD, you have to write the final layout to tape to send to the mastering/replication facility), you can copy single-layer CSS-encrypted DVDs just fine with General blanks by decrypting the content first, then creating a new UDF 1.02 layout in software such as Nero and placing the freshly-decrypted files into the VIDEO_TS folder in the layout, then burning it. I know this works, because I've done it with a single-layer DVD I own as a proof-of-concept.

Theoretically you could duplicate a dual-layer DVD by decrypting it, then extracting the MPEG2 data from the VOB, recompressing it at a lower bitrate so the finished product will be less than 4400MB, then creating new VOBs and burning those. It would be a pig of a job, but theoretically quite possible. (Why bother, though? Just turn it into an SVCD or something similar.)