got a brother with kids. his kids always end up scratching up the dvds. he's tired of buying movies for them. supposedly you can legally backup the dvds you buy. how do you do this? on a macbook preferably. but pc will do. do you need a program?

Some of them you can put into your computer, go to explore and drag all the files into a folder on your desktop and burn off again. I've had a 50/50 sucess rate doing this owing to copyright protections on some of them.

i will give that a try dime, thanks!

I use 3 programs (all free [and all Windows only, I'm afraid]) for backing up DVDs these days.

DVDFab to rip (usually only the main movie, without subtitles or extra audio streams).

DVD Shrink to reduce and output the ripped data to a 4475 MB ISO for burning to a single layer disc.

Imgburn to burn the ISO.

unfortunately this is gonna lead to more stupid questions on my part.

are most commercial dvds dual layered?

is there a way to back it up the entire original thing. i.e. menus, subtitles, etc.

Yep.


Yep. DVDFab can do that, too. I just like to strip out everything but the movie because (a) I like being able to just pop the disc in and have the movie immediately begin, and when it ends, the player stops and allows the drive to spin down instead of spinning on and on at a menu; (b) the more extraneous crap I get rid of, the less compression is applied to the movie-- many times none is needed at all, but DVD Shrink always does a fantastic, unnoticeable job anyway; and (c) single-layer blanks are cheaper. I've always found dual-layer blanks to be quite flaky in my attempts to burn them and in getting different players to read them. Just not worth the trouble to me.

Not stupid questions at all, btw.

yep, back them up with dvd shrink for an easy cheap method

very good info. thanks a ton. will run by the bro and see where he wants to go with this.

also, on a mac, a good program is mac the ripper.
thats what i use to backup DVD's, and it retains the menus and extras