kiran_sham said:
I have a DVD player (DESAY, works good for me) and a DVD recorder (Panasonic ES10). I am trying to record a movie being played in my DVD player, feeding as input to the DVD recorder. But the copyright protection stuff is not letting me do it and the DVD recorder gives out a message saying recording can not be done.
I am recording this solely for my private use and not for sale or re-distribution. Does anyone know if there is any way of recording such discs that are protected? The DVD recorder manual says that it can not record stuffs having this protection, but I am looking for something like a hack (similar to region setting hack in DVD players). Any help in this regard would be appreciated!
By some interpretations, what you're proposing to do is illegal, particularly if the DVD you are backing up is not one that you own. However, we'll assume that you still have the legal rights to back up discs that you do own.
Most (through perhaps not all) standalone DVD recorders have composite video and analog stereo audio inputs. Even if you can eliminate the MacroVision copy protection from the video (by a software hack, if available, on the source player or by some processing beteen the source player and the recorder), you still won't have the best possible video image as composite video just isn't as good as component video, much less digital video. Similarly, you're going to lose your Dolby Digital or DTS surround soundtrack and get, at best, a stereo soundtrack. In addition, once the signal gets "inside" the recorder, it has to be encoded into MPEG video and audio. Most will argue that "real-time" MPEG encoding on affordable standalone DVD recorders just aren't up to the task of encoding a very high quality video signal. Many recorders offer different "quality" settings, where the "best" quality setting (using the least amount of video compression) ends up giving you just one hour of video on a standard single-layer DVD/R disc. Also, most affordable standalone DVD recorders don't yet support dual-layer media that would increase the capacity at any "quality" setting. And it's not like dual-layer media is readily available anywhere or all that affordable yet, plus many DVD players have problems reading this format.
Other members have mentioned computer-based approaches to backing up DVDs. There are a variety of programs to do this, all of which will eliminate both the CSS digital copy protection and the MacroVision analog (if you will) copy protection. These programs typically "rip" the digital content to the hard drive and eliminate the copy protection schemes as they do so. Two free programs that do that are DVDShrink and DVDEncrypter (both for Windows). Though both are no longer being updated, they are still available.
Once you have the contents of the source disc on your hard drive, you can burn it to a PC-based DVD recorder drive using Copy-to-DVD (freeware if I recall) or popular (though not free) software like Nero Burning ROM and Roxio Easy CD/DVD Creator. This approach works for backing up single-layer discs onto single-layer DVD/R discs or backing up dual-layer discs (which include most movie DVDs) onto dual-layer DVD/R discs. What about backing up dual-layer discs onto single-layer DVD/R discs?
To do that, you have to main options. One is to re-encode ALL of the video on the source disc, adding significant extra levels of video compression. This approach keeps all the "extra" material (menus, extra soundtracks, commentaries, previews, "making of" documentaries, deleted scenes, etc.), but may give you video that is unwatchable, particularly on larger, better-quality HD displays. The other approach is to "re-author" the disk, eliminating all of the "extra" material and backing up "only" the movie itself (possibly even trimming the titles and/or credits as well). This approach can often fit the movie onto a single-layer disc with no additional compression, giving you an "exact" video copy. Even if you do have to add some compression, it won't be as much as if you still had all the "extra" material. Some people also like this approach because, when you stick the disc in, the movie simply starts - no previews, ads or anything. DVDShrink (freeware) can do either of the above approaches. DVD Decrypter can "rip" the film but doesn't do re-authoring. DVD2One can re-author, though without all of the flexibility of DVDShrink and is not freeware.
Technically, there is a third approach, which products like DVD XCopy used. These would more-or-less copy one layer of the source DVD to one DVD/R disc and the second layer to another DVD/R disc, and would automatically fiddle around a bit with the menus so that you couldn't choose a feature from the second disc if you were playing the first and vice versa. This required you to swap discs in mid-movie and didn't work with all features (particularly those movies that allow branching out to extra material during the movie whenever some graphic appears on screen).
There are a lot of DVD-copying packages out there and all of them, whether freeware or commercial, follow one or more of these approaches. Some give you great flexibility but require you to do more work. Others are simple "one-button" approaches which make all the decisions for you (which may not always be the ones you would have chosen).
I've used DVDShrink to back up a number of my DVDs. On a few newer ones with some forms of newer copy protection, DVDShrink couldn't fully read the disc onto the drive. For those, I used DVD Decrypter, which added a few new tricks to handle the newer discs. I then pointed DVDShrink at the files on the hard drive and let it do its magic.
I think we should all be able to back up discs (Audio CDs, DVDs, games, etc.) that we own. I'd rather have little ones messing up a backup copy of a Disney flick than gumming up an original. Just my opinion though.
