Copyright Information

We all have been there, a friend has a DVD that we would really like to own, but that item is out of print. It happens very often with Disney's DVDs, they issue a DVD for a limited time, and if you missed it, all you've got is to spend months looking for it, perhaps get an overpriced copy over the Internet. Some movies never made it to DVD, for instance a funny movie with Ryan O'Neil called "The Thief Who Came to Dinner" never made it onto DVD in the States. There is a copy available in Germany, but it is region 2 and it's also not easy to get by. But the friend, neighbour, whoever, has an original he bought when he was in Germany and there you have it. I am not going to bother you with the legal issues. I will mention only this, do it at your own risk. Allegedly personal copies of the original disks are permitted, but don't quote me on that. In any case, the DVD is copyright protected and probably somewhere around 9GB big. There you are faced with two additional problems: The region code, which will maybe make it unplayable in your DVD player, or computer, and how to fit the DVD onto your DVD-R which is only 4.7GB. First of all, let's get rid of the copyright protection. Several software programs are available that take care of that. There is an easy to handle software, where you almost have nothing to do, named AnyDVD. It's a commercial program which removes all limitations you can think of. Copy protection, region code, access protection, anything, you can copy the DVD then even with Nero, provided you use a Double Layer disc. Since that these disks are expensive, we will ignore that possibility. There is a nice little forbidden and discontinued program, free and widely available per Google search, called DVD Decrypter. This little gadget does just that, it copies the contents of your DVD without encryption to your hard drive. Then you could use another freely available program, called DVD Shrink, where you can adjust just what you want to keep, throw out unwanted data like the German language in this case, the FBI warning - no pun intended - and reauthor the disc to your liking. On the other hand, you can copy the full disk and shrink it to size. This little gadget not only removes the region code, but can also decrypt the DVD to a certain level. For Macrovision decryption, you still have to use the DVD Decrypter. You can specify if the software delivers an ISO image file or the files in a VIDEO_TS folder, DVD standard. The ISO image you can burn with the DVD Decrypter, the VIDEO_TS with Nero, where you choose to burn a Video DVD.