Kevin's Watch

www.cdfreaks.com/article/117

First we will introduce you to the DVD format, tell you why you can’t just simply copy it and the processes needed in order to make a copy. After that we will discuss some useful tools to assist you in making your backup.


Let’s copy those files!

You would think it would be as easy as copying these files to a folder on your hard disk and then burn them to a recordable DVD, but unfortunately they didn’t make it that easy. The files copied will contain useless data and your copy will not work,

DVD movies are protected with the Content Scrambling System (CSS), a protection developed and adopted by the Hollywood Studios. It simply protects them from pirates who want to make copies to sell. Simplified the protection encrypts the data on a DVD and requires a special key to decrypt it. DVD playing software developers have received such a key from the studios and therefore their software is able to read the information, but unfortunately the studios don’t hand out keys to anyone else.

However the protection has proven to be weak and has been beaten by many applications. Most of them are based on the software DeCSS of which you might have heard due the many lawsuits that try to forbiod the software. The software is illegal in many countries. Removing the DeCSS protection and getting the movies to e.g. a hard drive is mainly referred to as ripping. Later on we will discuss the software available for ripping. Besides CSS movie sometimes also contain a protection developed by Macrovision, this is also on many VHS tapes, software that is able to remove CSS, will also easily remove this Macrovision protection.



Another problem is that if you are planning to record it to a recordable DVD, it simply won’t fit. Why doesn’t it fit? Currently DVD recordables can only contain about 4.7 (actually it’s 4.38 ) Gigabytes of data, they are generally referred to as DVD-5 (4.7 ~ 5). The movie you have purchased might contain a lot more Gigabytes, many movies are released with up to about 9 Gigabytes of data (DVD-9), you will understand that a DVD-9 movie, will not fit on a DVD-5 disc. In order to make this happen there are three possibilities:

Remove data
Shrink data
Split the data

Sometimes you will need to make choice between them, sometimes you can combine these techniques. On the next page we will show you the best solutions and show you where to go when you want to create a backup.