I'm relatively new to the whole consumer side of the DVD thing. I used to work in video production, and the place that I worked at had a DVD authoring machine which burned DVDs in realtime from video. I never really was too interested in how it worked. If you wanted to copy a DVD - any DVD, regardless of copy protection - you just popped it into the computer, hit "duplicate", and put in a blank when it asked for it. So, here's my question. There are lots of great guides on this site, but I'm looking for a bit more... 1) Is the DVD disc or drive which records a 6.xx Gb DVD (movie on DVD) any different from common consumer recorders and discs? IF yes, how so, and how does a person buy one? I know they have duplicating towers. 2) There's all this copy protection stuff. Well, I never buy that, because I'm a programmer. I have a DVD with a series of billions of 1s and 0s on it. What the hell is preventing me from copying that entire disc, as a bit scream, onto my hard drive? And then, back onto another disc? Thanks!
Hey jantman- To question 1 - I've never heard of a 6.xx GB burner...the standard is 4.7 GB and are available everywhere. Best Buy, circuit city, comp usa, etc. The double layer 9.4 GB storage discs and burners have recently become available to the mainstream public...however you might want to hold off until they work all the bugs out associated with all new technology. I recommend ritek G04 4.7 GB recordable discs, I've found them the cheapest at www.meritline.com. You really have to guess and test, some DVD-R's don't work with certain players, etc. Target sells TDK discs, those have worked well with me too, but they are more expensive. Of my 4 DVD players, the TDK's only work on certain players and the riteks only work on others. It's all guess and test. Do an AD search for TDK and ritek and see what other users say about 'em. For question 2 - I'm a programmer too, actually an above normal percentage of AD users are, we're all geeks here . Anyway, it is just a bit stream...but it's encrypted using a standard key based encryption. It's called CSS encryption, and it's been cracked. Jon Johanson did it...and he cracked iTunes encryption recently as well. The CSS crack is open source if you're interested. There are programs available on AD like DVD Decrypter for ISO's and 4.7 GB discs, and DVD Shrink (highly recommended) which can compress 9.4 GB (full length movie standard) discs so that they fit on 4.7 GB DVD-R's. Those programs should be all you need. These programs use the DeCSS code to get the key, and then stream the files to your hard drive or another burner. If you have any troubles, if anybody finds this lengthy post helpful at all, lemme know. -EMAN
