The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)

Yesterday, I discussed making master disk images of your CDs / DVDs in Disk Utility.  Now, for the final installment of this trilogy of posts, I’ve done away with the CD aspect, and will be focusing on how to copy those larger-than-4.7GB DVDs you own to another DVD.

I should warn you first, that whereas the previous methods mentioned here avoid tampering with DRM (Digital Rights Management) and therefore remain more or less legal, the method I am about to outline becomes illegal if you use it to copy a commercial disk with DRM protection, even if you are trying to legally exercise your fair use rights. This is a huge problem with DRM: it interferes with your rights as a consumer.  So, going into this you now know two things: 1. This could be ruled illegal in a court of law. 2. DRM is bad, because it infringes on your fair use rights.

Here’s the possibly illegal step you will have to take should the DVD be either DRM-protected or region-encoded for a region that is different from what your DVD player currently supports.  Get a copy of DVDBackup.  This free program copies the content of your DVD to a VIDEO_TS folder on your hard drive and in the process of copying the files can strip them of DRM and / or region-encoding. It’s fairly simple to operate. Read the read me. Read the warnings.  Run the program.

Now, you have to find a way to compress that VIDEO_TS folder and burn it back to a 4.7GB DVD-R disk. This can be done simply and effectively (though in a fair amount of processor-number-crunching time) by Roxio’s Popcorn ($50). Drag and drop the VIDEO_TS folder you created with DVDBackup into Popcorn, click the “Burn” button, throw in a blank DVD-R, and Popcorn starts compressing the video files from your DVD into the highest quality format that will fit onto a 4.7GB disk.  The resulting DVD will have all the same functionality (extra tracks, special features, and subtitles) that the original DVD had, but with a slightly lesser video quality.

That’s it! Now you can copy nearly every DVD that comes your way. Now if you’re interested in copying the DVD into a compressed format—I don’t know—perhaps so you can have multiple movies loaded up on your portable Mac for the next long plane ride you have, you’re going to want to use one of the many tools available to rip the DVD to DivX. Maybe I’ll write something about that in the future.  In the meantime, Google it.