How To Copy a Copy Protected DVD

Da Vinci — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 16:18:44 +0000

I bet that you have tried to copy a DVD before, but didn’t succeed because it was either copy protected or it failed without clear reason. In a previous post I have described how to copy a DVD to an iPod, but here’s a way to simply backup your DVDs to DVDs. There are two main problems with copying DVDs, one is copy protection and two is that commercial DVDs have larger storage capacity than regular DVDs that you can burn at home. The media industry uses DVD copy protection technology that makes it *very* difficult to copy DVDs, yet most copyright laws allow owners to make backups or their property. There are a lot of wrong reasons for copying or backing up DVDs, but there are also many good reasons. If you have young children then you would know the value of backing up your DVDs and so here’s how to do it using DVD43 and DVD Shrink. For free!.

1) Remove copy protection using DVD43
DVD43 gets rid of the copy protection nonsense. If you try to run DVD Shrink without decryption software you may get “DVD Shrink encoutered an error and cannot continue: Copy protection error“. Once DVD43 is installed (which requires a reboot) it runs in the backround and removes any copy protection.

2) Compress and copy using DVD Shrink
DVD Shrink compresses commercial DVDs to fit on to a regular 4GB DVD. Doom9 has an excellent article on how to use DVD Shrink.

Copy DVD To iPod Using Freeware

Da Vinci — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 02:18:56 +0000

You finally caved and got the first season of 24 or Lost on DVD. Now youâ€™re hooked and you would use every opportunity to watch it. Then you realize: â€œHey, my iPod! Itâ€™s perfect for traveling and for the gym, but how can I copy my DVDs to my iPod?!â€? . So you do some Googling, but you discover that there are hundreds of solutions out there and, worse, that copying DVDs has become a money making scheme! Besides that, nobody tells you that there are two big technical problems with copying or converting DVDs:

1) Most commercial DVDs are encrypted for copy protection;
2) There are many encoding variables (bitrates, aspect ratios etc.).

It isn’t publicized, but commercial DVDs are normally copy protected with encryption technology (including region codes) and most commercial DVD copy software does not allow users to copy protected DVDs. Without going into the legalities suggested in #1 above or the complexities suggested in #2 above, here is a free solution to copy DVD to iPod. It’s really very easy, but the first time will take a few minutes longer.

Step 1: Decrypt DVD using DVD43

1) Download and install DVD43. AnyDVD (http://www.slysoft.com/en/anydvd.html) is another option, but itâ€™s not free.

2) After downloading and installing DVD43 you will need to reboot your computer. DVD43 runs as a service so you do not need to do anything to enable the decryption besides watching the yellow smiley face … turn into a little devil … and then turn to a green smiley face when you insert the DVD you want to copy.

Step 2: Rip DVD to iPod mp4 format using Handbrake

1) Download and install Handbrake (Windows GUI version)

2) In the Source section:

* Click on Browse and select the TS_VIDEO folder in your DVD drive.
* Select the Read Video button.
* Select OK.
* Select the View Data button. This will return all the titles on the DVD.
* Select the title you want to copy and click the Select Title button.
* Optional: Select DVD Chapters.
Take note of the Aspect Ratio value shown at the bottom of the Source section. Example: 1.78

3) In the Destination section:

* Click on Destination and browse to the folder where you want to save the movie. Enter a File name and select mp4 as the Save movie type.
* For Encoder, select .H.264 (iPod)
* For Audio Encoder, select AAC.
* For Height/Width, select the option that matched the aspect ratio that you noted in Step 1:

For 1.33:1: 320 x 240
For 1.78:1: 368 x 208
For 2.35:1: 384 x 160

4) In the bottom section:

* Leave Picture Settings, Audio Settings, H.264 and Query Editor as is.
* Video Settings: Enter 768 into the Video BitRate text box and leave everything else default.
* Optional: Set number of processors under Advanced Settings.
* Finally, hit the Encode Video button at the bottom.
* Hit OK on the start encoding message. A command line window will open the ripping process will start.

Step 3: Copy your mp4(s) to your iPod

Use iTunes to copy your mp4(s) to your iPod in the usual way.

Additional information

Handbrake is really a CLI (command line) tool and the GUI that is used in this post, really just builds and executes the command line instruction. In the GUI you can see the resulting command line instruction by selecting the “Query Editor” tab and hitting Generate Query Now. Now, you can go further and use this “query” to script batch copying by copying it into a .bat file (note that you will need to replace hbtest.exe in the query with hbcli.exe for it to work).