That special extended edition movie DVD or concert DVD you've been anxiously waiting for has finally been released and the last thing you want to happen is scratch it or damage it in any way. What can you do prevent that? The first thing I do is make a copy for viewing and put away the original for safe keeping.
Commercial DVDs are produced in 2 flavors: DVD-5 which is a single sided single layer DVD that stores up to 4.38GB of data (where 1 kilobyte=1024 bytes), and DVD-9 which is a single sided dual layer DVD that can store up to 7.95GB of data. DVD-R/W and DVD+R/W does not support DVD-9 format.
Since most commercial DVDs are DVD-9 with copy protection, the trick, therefore, is to copy up to nearly 8GB to a 4.7GB recordable disc, (which in truth is only 4.38GB), without being hindered by the copy protection.
There are several applications available that claim to "copy DVDs" but few actually do it. Some will "shrink" or compress the data and burn the DVDR/W for you, but few will extract the ALL of the copy protection from the original DVD files. The solution is to do the job in 2 steps.
Step 1.
Extract all the files from the original DVD to your hard drive so that these new files are free of copy protection and region codes. I recommend DVD Decrypter which is free.
Load your original DVD into your DVD ROM and open DVD Decrypter. Click the Mode Tab and make sure File is checked. To your immediate right you shoul see that all of the files are highlighted blue. If not, highlight ALL of the files by Shift-Clicking. Now you are ready to extract or "Rip" the DVD. Simply click the round DVD icon and the file conversion begins, copying the clean files onto your hard drive. You may change the default destination if you wish. This will take 20-40 minutes depending on the speed of your hardware.
Congratulations, you now have a "clean" copy of your original DVD file structure on your hard drive. You may now view the movie directly from the hard drive with your favorite DVD Software Player.
A note about DVD file structure: A DVD usually has 2 directories,
AUDIO_TS
VIDEO_TS
Both the audio and video files that run the movie are contained in the VIDEO_TS directory. There is rarely, if ever, anything in the AUDIO_TS directory. In fact, DVD Decrypter does not even create an AUDIO_TS directory on your hard drive so don't be alarmed. There will be files in the VIDEO_TS directory that have the following extensions: .BUP, .IFO and .VOB.
Step 2.
Burn the extracted files from your hard drive to a DVD.
To do this we must use an application that will 1) compress the files enough to fit on a 4.38GB DVD WITHOUT any detectable loss of quality, and 2) burn the DVD. You have several choices. DVDShrink is a free application you can use. My favorite, however, is CloneDVD. This is by far the most user friendly application I've tested, and is fast with no discernable loss of quality.
Load a blank DVD into your DVD writer and open CloneDVD. Click the Clone DVD icon if you wish to copy the ENTIRE DVD AS IS. Click the Copy DVD Titles icon if you wish to copy ONLY the movie and one audio stream. (This option excludes menus and extra features).
On the next page that will appear, navigate to the DVD video files.
Click the VIDEO_TS directory.
Click Next on the following 2 pages that appear, (they are self explanatory). This brings you to the Output Method page. Make sure the correct drive letter and DVD writer name is identified here, i.e. H: Pioneer DVD-RW. Click Go!
First CloneDVD creates DVD files, then it writes to the DVD.
Walk away from the computer until it's finished. Depending on the speed of your hardware you will soon be the proud owner of a perfect backup copy of your original commercial DVD.
