Many of you know about 321 Studios products. Did anyone know, though, that 321 sales and tech support are telling people that DVD XCopy Platinum can rip a DVD-9 disk without compression? So far, I've been unable to determine if this is true or not because of 2 things I learned after I bought the product and before I installed it, which have caused me to put off installation. First, you have to uninstall XCopy Express before installing Platinum, which might seem OK, but if Platinum is buggy, you'll have to spend 20 minutes or so getting your system back to where you want it, and risk random, tray Registry entries. Second, XCopy Xpress does a weird thing on my system, which it may do on others' machines: every time I open the program, and right after the 321 splash screen comes up, the dialogue box for using dial-up network pops up. OK, I thought: just a strange little similarity between two executable files. But then I checked the text on the hard drive inside the file that contains DVD XCopy's disclaimer screen, which is the first thing you see on a XCopy-ripped DVD. That info file contains the date and time that you backed up the DVD. Is it possible that Xpress is trying to send 321 Studios this information, which is why the dial-up networking box appears. If so, the implications are troubling. Any comments?
Xcopy (not express) will rip a DVD-9 but it spans it over two discs when you burn it which is why there is no compression. I'm not familiar with the call-in thing you're talking about as I haven't used Xcopy for quite a while.
I've seen comments in afterdawn about encrypted information being sent back to 321 studios. It sounded a bit paranoid at first, but the members discussing the issue seemed very knowledgable. The one comment I remember was something to the effect that, "no information is useless information," implying that 321 Studios motives were not in the user's interests. It made me wonder.
A connection is if fact instigated. It is to check for any new updates. Yes, the copies are "stamped" as part of their Anti-Piracy protection policy. Pete The use of 321Gone does not erase that "stamp" as far as I am aware :-( _X_X_X_X_X_[small]The “old man” Pete (ö¿ô) Compaq 8000, Pent 4 CPU 2.84GHz, 1GB RAM. 340GB HD, 7200 (Maxtor 120, Western 200 & 20. 4 Drives, JLMS DVD ROM, HP DVD Writer 200j, Nec 4X DVD RW ND-1300A & AXV CD/DVD-ROM. GeForce4 Ti 4200-128MB, OS– XP sp1.[/small]
