DVD Copying basic knowledge - 2

Don't think it would be easy copying these files to a folder on your hard disk and then burn them to a recordable DVD. The files copied to your harddrive will be useless data or your copy will not work.

DVD movies are protected by a protection developed and adopted by the Hollywood Studios called the Content Scrambling System (CSS). It simply protects them from pirates who want to make copies to sell. Simplified the protection encrypts the data on a DVD and requires a special key to decrypt it. DVD playing software developers have received such a key from the studios and therefore their software is able to read the information, but the studios don?t hand out keys to anyone else.

However the css protection has proven to be weak and has been beaten by many applications. Most of them are based on the software DeCSS of which you might have heard due the many lawsuits that try to forbiod the software. The software is illegal in many countries. Removing the CSS protection and getting the movies to e.g. a hard drive is mainly referred to as ripping.We will discuss the software available for ripping later. Besides CSS movie sometimes also contain a protection developed by Macrovision, this is also on many VHS tapes, software that is able to remove CSS, will also easily remove this Macrovision protection.
Another problem is that if you are planning to record it to a recordable DVD, it simply won?t fit. Why doesn?t it fit? Currently DVD recordables can only contain about 4.7 (actually it?s 4.38) Gigabytes of data, they are generally referred to as DVD-5 (4.7 ~ 5).  The movie you have purchased might contain a lot more Gigabytes, many movies are released with up to about 9 Gigabytes of data (DVD-9), you will understand that a DVD-9 movie, will not fit on a DVD-5 disc. In order to make this happen there are three possibilities:
* Remove data
* Shrink data
* Split the data
Sometimes choice have to be made between them, sometimes you can make combination between these techniques.  Next, I will tell you how to handle there problems.

Solutions - Remove, Shrink, Split?

Now there are many applications available that are able to let you choose which parts of the DVD movie to be copied to a recordable DVD. you can rip the movie to your hard drive by selecting the right information and see if it will fit on the recordable DVD, if it fits then you can burn it. If not there are still two options for you, shrinking or splitting.

Shrinking is probably the most commonly used option. DVD copy software packages are commonly referred to as compression engines, remuxers, transcoders or encoders. The software is able to compress the MPEG-2 compressed movies, while bringing down the amount of data used and make it possible to fit on a recordable DVD.

Movie compression is a very intensive task for computer, the faster your system is, the less time you will have to spend on this process. Generally you should take at least 2 hours' time for the entire process to complete with an average system.

Some software can split a movie to several discs, the disadvantage is that you will have to change the discs while watching. Generally shrinking is preferred.