DVD Ripper/Burner

[ManicQueen]

Last month the boyfriend and I bought a brank spanking new puter that has a DVD writer. I want to use it! What's a good program that I can download.. a good decent FREE program I can use?

And what's this stuff I hear about having some kind of special de-coder that needs to be used?

Any help/info would be greatly appreciated :grin

B~

[Troy Spiral (13)]

Unfortunatly its not as easy as it could be. There are several factors involved and a dizzying array of software choices.

But assuming your using a single layer burner:

To "break" the encryption and rip the DVD: (this thing here is good regardless of what kind of burner you have)

http://www.dvddecrypter.com/

To encode and slap it back into a (single layer) DVD burnable file:

http://www.dvdshrink.org/what.html

This assumes you got Nero or Alcohol free with your burner as you still need to .

Be ready to make a bunch of coasters and deal with some frustration and read a lot of help files before you get it all working properly.

Whats the actual make/model of your burner?

Assuming your only using it for backup of existing DVDs you own of course! =)

[SomeDanGuy]

Troy mentioned "single layer" which is probably a good thing to understand. The DVDs you buy in stores are "Dual Layered" which means they hold about 9 gigs of data. The DVD-Rs that most people burn to are only single-layered so they only hold 4.7 gigs of data. Therefore, there are sort of 3 componant steps to copying DVDs:

1) rip (copy info from DVD onto computer)

2) compress (since DVD-Rs have half the capacity of commercial ones)

3) burn (the actually writing to the DVD-R

I don't recall having trouble with encryption very often, but I don't burn DVDs like I used to these days.

What I use:

1) DVD Shrink, like Troy suggested. This will both rip and compress the files to exactly the size you need

2) Nero to burn. I'm sure other programs work too, I just got this one free

[SomeDanGuy]

OH! And make sure you pay attention to whether is says DVD-R or DVD+R! I learned that the hard way when I bought a bunch of DVD-Rs only to find out that my burner could only burn to DVD+Rs. I think the newer ones can do both, but check on that to make sure.

[Troy Spiral (13)]

Lately a lot of the newer DVDs arent decrypted by DVD shrink properly or the files get corrupted halfway through compression process if not already decrypted by DVD decrypter. Seems like DVD Shrinks development is stunted , if not totally stopped, so i ended up having to use DVD decrypter a lot, finally after like the 20th time , having shrink bomb out on me durring decryption, i just said fuck it, and now i dont even bother trying to have dvd shrink decrypt anymore.

Also might be some compatablity problem with DVD shrinks decyrption and my burner /shrug.

As a side topic, it would be nice there was an "all in one" program , but so far i dont know of any, even pay software that will decrypt, compress , encode and burn all in one package.

[ManicQueen]

Thanks guys.. since my dvd writer came with the computer, I'm assuming it's a HP. It's got double layer 16x DVD+R/RW.. not like I know what any of that means tho

B~