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I got a DVD writer a little while ago and thought I’d just post on how to do an easy backup (legal, of course ;-)) of your DVD’s. If your using the easy-to-come-by media and DVD burner (meaning, your not going to be using dual-layers) then you’ll probably need two DVD±R’s (commercial burners burn on 2 layers, basically doubling the capacity).

Now you can use either DVD+R’s or DVD-R’s. Most burners these days can burn on both. DVD+R’s are generally better quality, but cost a little more and DVD-R’s are the opposite. I’ve heard lots of people that use DVD-R’s exclusively without problems, so it’s up to you.

I do things the easy way First thing you want to do is grab the software:

1. DVD Decrypter
2. InterVideo DVDCopy 2

Now the first thing you want to do is decrypt the DVD (they put protection on them, much the same like games have Safedisk etc.). So fire up DVD Decrypter. It should automatically “sense” your DVD in your drive and the pane on the right should be populated with a list of files (.VOB and such). Since you want to backup the whole movie, select them all and click the big Decrypt button (with the DVD-Rom icon pointing to the hard drive icon). This will take a little while to complete.

Now what you want to do is open up DVDCopy2. I use this app to split the DVD into two parts (because we must put them on two DVD’s, remember?). Change the source to the directory you just decrypted the movie to, and change the Target to your DVD writer.

Before you press the “Burn” button, click the little wrench icon to bring up the “Optional Settings” dialog. Switch to the “DVD Media” tab and uncheck the “Fit to One Disk” box. The default action of DVDCopy2 is to compress your movie so it’ll fit onto a disk, but with compression you get some loss of quality. If you take out all the special features and whatnot then you might be able to get reasonable quality from a compressed movie. Anyway, press OK to return back to the main window. Make sure the DVD button “bubble” is pressed (the “Copy As:”) and you can now click the Burn button.

So there you have it That’s how I do most of my backups when I’m in a hurry. There are lots more ways to do it though, check out the great guides over at Doom9.org.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 20th, 2004 at 5:23 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.