Backing up Commercial DVDs

The US copyright law allows us to make a backup of our commercial DVDs that we legally own, but unfortunately, the existing DVD burning software such as NERO refuses to reproduce this copy-protected media. If you have a DVD player and CD burner in your PC, this article provides a solution to exercise your legal rights back up your DVD movies for safekeeping and archival purposes.

The Solution

Convert them to compressed data (DIVX) movies or similar format.

This method results in only being able to view the movie (in general) on your PC, unless you have a DVD player that supports DIVX formats, or can connect a PC to your television screen. Within the next few years, we will continue to see a convergence between personal computers and televisions. Many of the newer digital flat-panel television screens now provide you with a standard 15 pin D-sub VGA connector with which you can attach a computer equipped with a DVD player.

Another benefit of this back-up method is that it provides a means of starting a total-home multimedia collection where you don’t have to actually find any given DVD – you can just pick it from a list on your computer and play the movie, anywhere in the house where we have a wirelessly connected computer. Watch a movie on your laptop, from anywhere, for example. The down side is you won’t get the previews or other features of the DVD, unless you specifically elect to back those up too (see below).

Install and open the program called DVD Master Backup (a free, open-source download at this link: http://www.brothersoft.com/dvd_video/dvd/dvd_master_backup_42177.html

After a small donation nag screen, you get this:

My DVD drive is E:, yours may be a different letter. Most commonly this would be D:

Title number: You have to examine the contents of your commercial DVD under “My Computer” or Windows Explorer to find out which movie is the main feature. Most DVDs will have a directory called VIDEO_TS in which you will find the actual movie files. With the DVD I just saved, THE MACHINIST, I noticed that most of the larger files (greater than 1 million KB) started with VTS_03. The other files in there were presumably out-takes, previews, and other stuff. So I picked Title number 3. I opted for the NTSC standard.

I created and used a directory called C:\DVDBackup as my data drive. I made this available on our home network so that anyone can pick up the movies. Under AVI filename, enter the name of the motion picture DVD you are backing up. I used THE_MACHINIST in this case.

Click “GO.” It will take about 35 to 50 minutes or more to decode and crunch each DVD to a file. The program will read the files on the DVD and then go through a number of translations (automatic) and the resulting movie will be packaged under a /divx directory. This can be burned to a DVD as plain data (i.e., no worries about copy protection).

Each movie will take up from 400 to 500mb (estimate about ½ of a gigabyte on average). Of course you could always use Nero to burn these DIVX files to an ordinary data DVD for safekeeping and to free up the space on the hard disk drive. Nero will make data DVDs, but on’t copy protected DVDs to their native (commercial) format.

Copying Commercial DVDs to DVD blank media

Don’t be fooled by these programs! They can copy DVD to DVD, but in very many cases, the DVD you want to copy is protected and cannot be read by this software! I am sure glad I found out about this before shelling out $39.99 to $59.99 for any of these programs!

Mike Moore