Weapons of Mass DistractionCopy DVD Movies

Everyone seems to be trying to copy dvds these days. There are all kinds of programs out there that let you backup discs to either blank dvds or cd. Movies can be written to either dvd-r, dvd+r, dvd-rw, or dvd+rw. It should be noted that copying a movie is illegal in most places. These software applications are only to be used to make backups of movies you own.

Most dvds contain between 4 and 9 gigabytes of data. A single layer writable dvd can only hold 4.6 gigs of data. This means that unless the film is very short it cannot just be copied to a blank disk. There are a couple of ways around this problem. The first way to reduce the amount of data required is to remove extras from the disc. This pretty much means stripping out everything but the movie itself. In general, language soundtracks that you don't need are also discarded, but don't usually take up very much space to begin with. The actual video portion of the movie is the huge part. If after removing the previously mentioned stuff doesn' t shrink the dvd down small enough to fit on a disc, there are a couple of options left.

1. The first is to burn it to more than 1 disc. Unfortunately swapping discs in the middle of a movie is annoying. I do not recommend this method.
2. The second method is to re-encode the video at a lower bitrate to reduce the size. DVD video encoding takes a tremendous amount of processor power. If your computer is really old or slow you might find yourself frustrated with the amount of time required to re encode the movie. You will also need at least 4-10gigabytes of free disk space available in order to hold the files to burn to the blank disc. Be prepared for it to take several hours to make a backup of a single dvd.

There is a huge crop of Windows Programs out there these days which make this process invisible to people. There is a program called DVD Shrink, which is free, that you can use if you want to have tight control over this entire process. Unfortunately it is a lot more complicated than just a 1-click dvd backup utility.

There are several commercial software products out there as well which make this process extremely simple. You may be reluctant to buy a program like this, but trust me, after spending more than a few frustrating hours trying to copy a disc yourself using other programs you would happily go back and shell out the few dollars necessary to do it right.

One of the programs I've found is called DVD Wizard Pro. It allows you to backup movies to other dvds, cds, or on your hard drive. It also lets you to pick your destination format such as DivX, VCD, MPEG, etc. It runs on Windows only. The installation program is very simple and you will be up and running in no time. Copying from dvd to dvd is extremely simple. Backing up to formats such as DivX takes a little bit more configuration since you will need to choose your video codec, bitrate, etc. It will then prompt you to insert the destination media into the drive, making the entire process very painless.

During my testing my dvd-rom seemed to be the bottleneck in this system. Some DVD-ROM drives limit their read speeds to 2x when a dvd-video disc is in the drive. This is done to reduce unnecessary noise while watching a movie (because the disc can spin slower). I tested it with a disc in a software emulated drive and it was many times faster. This will be the same for all dvd copying applications, so this isn't a limitation of this particular software. You may have better results than I did if you have a newer drive. I found the UI to be very straightforward.

There is a demo version available that lets you give it a try, which allows you to backup the first 10 minutes. The cost of the full version is about what you'd pay for a movie or two. In my opinion this easily pays for itself after just a few uses. If you have any questions about it they have a very detailed FAQ on their website which probably answers any questions you may have.

I highly recommend that you check it out here.

Comments: