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RealNetworks To Introduce a Simple DVD Copier
langelgjm writes "The New York Times reports that RealNetworks will begin selling RealDVD today, a software program designed to make copying DVDs a trivial task for the average user. Unlike free alternatives, which generally require some technical knowledge and make it difficult to copy an entire DVD with extras, etc., RealDVD claims to be able to copy the entire DVD, menus and all. While sure to raise the ire of Hollywood, the program does have significant limitations: the DVDs it makes will only be playable on the computer where they were created; or, users can pay $20 per computer to play the DVDs on up to five additional computers."
you mean like dvdshrink?
turn up the jukebox and tell me a lie
It's still a DVD and still a CD. However, if you add DRM to a CD it cannot bear the Compact Disk Digital Audio symbol since it violates the Red Book specification. DVD is also the same in the sense that it wouldn't allowed to be called DVD Video because it wouldn't be following the standard set aside for it. DVD (Digital Versatile Disk) is still the name of the actual medium being written to.
Two step process for me. Mac The Ripper to decrypt/rip the entire DVD (menus and all) to a VIDEO_TS folder on my hard drive. Insert CD, click a button. Not too technical.
From there I can use VLC to play it as much as I want on any computer I copy it to. Can have a large HD full of complete DVDs immediately accessible. (and there are apps that will jukebox them for you)
From there I have to use a commercial app like Roxio's Toast to burn it to a physical CD, that works in a real DVD player. But Toast has always been a very good product, worth the coin. Drag and drop the VIDEO_TS folder into Toast and click burn. Only slightly more technical procedure than MTR.
Did I mention MTR strips out the NOOPs ("operation not permitted" when trying to FF past the FBI warning etc) and also removes region coding, during the rip?
Who on earth would pay for REALcrap?
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
OS X comes with something better than this seems to be. It's called Disk Utility. Put in the DVD, hit the 'Make Image' button, and get a disk image out. You can play this in Apple's DVD Player (also included with OS X), or with VLC or any other DVD player. I don't think you can burn it to a DVD without removing the CSS (which Disk Utility doesn't do - it's basically a GUI on dd).
Possibly this recompresses as well, but with hard disk space so cheap there doesn't seem much point (and recompressing at decent quality still takes some hours on even a reasonably fast computer).
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That's just the same as "dd if=/dev/$dvd of=my.iso"
Nothing special. Any *nix box can do this, assuming you are dumping to a filesystem that can deal with file sizes > 4GB.
DVD Decrypter, DVD Shrink. How hard is it, really?
I could teach my wife to do that in about five minutes. As an added bonus, it's free, it removes region protection, it removes UOP's (possibly the most annoying part of the DVD format to most people), keeps all the menus, shrinks it onto the cheaper single-layer DVD-R's with virtually zero visible difference and it doesn't have silly restrictions. A program with silly restrictions to stop a particular format from having silly restrictions?
I just backed up a couple of my boxsets using this because they were slightly damaged when we took them on holiday with us and I don't want to pay for them again if we do damage them. The majority of the time was spent looking at a little window wending its way through the DVD and swapping discs (I only had the one DVD-writer drive plugged in at the time and had to swap original for blank constantly).
I even did it using WINE because the PC with the writer was a home Linux server, and it worked perfectly. I very much doubt you could make it THAT much simpler, except possibly joining the two programs together and incurring the wrath of the DVD industry by doing so (does this software strip region-protection? It doesn't mention it).
I can't see anybody using this... people "in-the-know" enough to distinguish between DVD-R, DVD+R, DVD-RW, DVD+RW, DVD-RAM etc. and who know that this "is possible" are probably already doing it. I can't even get my parents to copy their CD's before they scratch them and that's a one-click operation. I can't see them doing it for their DVD's even if it's a one-click operation with this software. And, to be honest, I'd rather show them the "two-click" method that gets rids of the UOPS because that would astound them and they would kill to have that feature on their existing DVD's.
The problem with DVD shrink is that development stopped even before ARCoSS, which means that many newever DVDs can not be ripper directly without additional software. You can eiuther use DVD Decrypter (which is free, but introdues a very cumbersome step into the mix) or you can buy AnyDVD which sits just above the driver level and makes the DVD in the drive appear as a normal unencrypted, non copy-protected DVD. So even with DVDShrink, which is probably the best thing out there in my opinion, you either waste time or money, which is really the same thing anyway.