Copying DVDs -- all legally done, of course

[moribundman]

With a PC, I believe you use DVD Decrypter, copy the DVD to your hard drive and then burn it using DVD Shrink. What similar software is out there for the Intel Mac?

 

[moribundman]

I found Mac The Ripper and Kill The Ripper. Seems to work fine...

 

[55Test]

Why does Mac software have all the cool sounding names...?

 

[moribundman]

Cyberduck is the coolest.

 

[moribundman]

Well, I'm really not interested in shrinking file size. A 2 hour movie is about 4GB and a dual layer disc holds 9GB, right? By the way, I haven't been to a Blockbuster or other rental place since about '98.

 

[97tbird]

DVD Shrink has an option not to compress at all. it compresses by default. I had to find the option and "tell" it not to compress, and make and exact copy of the original dvd. After doing that, I could not tell any difference between the original and the copy. it looked and played great. (not that I thought the compressed copy was bad..it was really fine, too.)

 

[CivicFan]

Carbonics, You could try DVD Shrink set not to compress, as 97tbird suggests, or DVDFab decrypter to rip movies from a DVD to your HD in its 7-8 gig size. And it will not take a few hours, maybe 40 minutes for the whole disc depending on your drive. But since most of us do not have double layer DVD-Rs we have to compress the movie to fit on a 4.7 gig discs. The quality goes down but it's the best way to backup our movies.

 

[CivicFan]

moribundman, I think a 2 hour movie is 7.5 gigs or so uncompressed.

 

[Carbonics]

yes it can be copied quickly, I use smartripper. Very true you can do an almost 1 to 1 copy without compression if you have a dual layer burner, most don't as it was a stop gap solution until HD-DVD hit earlier this year. just saying that a transcoder pretty much rapes your video source, it just removes half the data. play a transcoded dvd on a big tv and you will be disappointed

 

[Carbonics]

dvd shrink is a transcoder, most of the one click copiers are transcoders - they are horrid. a transcoder acts like a comb, it sweeps across the video frame by frame and removes half of the data, resulting in pixelation during fast movement scenes. the only real way to ensure a quality (yes quality) backup is to re-encode the mpeg2 video... easiest way is to use dvd-rb (dvd rebuilder) on pc, not sure on a mac, but re-encoding the video results in a FAR superior picture quality than using a transcoder, of course it can take between 2 and 8 hours per movie depending on your CPU.... but then again who cares, you bought that big powerful cpu to do something, right? takes 3 to 4 hours on my P4 3.0ghz per movie, time well spent IMO... I just do other stuff while it goes, over before I know it. probably not real efficient if you are renting 3 movies a day from blockbuster and returning them the same day though - but you guys wouldn't be doing that.

 

[CivicFan]

I tried the DVD-rebuilder but it kept bombing. Not sure what the cause was because the error was not descriptive at all. Uninstalled it and went back to my DVD Shrink since I didn't see any benefit of figuring it out.

 

[Carbonics]

if you have a dual layer burner then there won't be a benefit over a 1 to 1 copy with shrink. not sure of the error, could be due to a missing link to an external encoder or something, it's sort of just a shell for a bunch of other programs that work together and it links to other programs used to encode the video.