DVD burners are almost ubiquitous with new PCs these days, but the question arises: what are all these people doing with them? Sure, there's editing videos off your camcorder, or making large data backups, but other than that, what purpose do they serve? DVD video backups, of course! But, how do you do it, and how long does it take?
What does a copy mean?
As of this writing, DVDs that you might buy cannot be efficiently copied. This is because production DVDs are dual layer -- they have twice the capacity of standard DVD writable media. Unlike CDs, you cannot just stick in a DVD, copy to another DVD, and have an exact copy.
What you can do is shrink the DVD down in quality to fit in writable media, or remove extra features from the DVD. Do you really need all those extra features? If so, you may want to back them up on a separate DVD, unless you want to reduce the quality.
For the purposes of this article, a copy means a copy of just the feature movie, in English, with English subtitles. This is a copy of that feature from a production DVD to a DVD writable medium.
Why Do This?
In the white hat arena, you can do this to back up DVDs. If you've ever used CDs a lot, you know they get scratched. DVDs are no different. How many times do you really want to buy that copy of Army Of Darkness? Plus, the first part of this exercise can be used to rip movies to, say, your laptop. This is incredibly convenient for a plane ride.
In the black hat arena, I suppose you could rent movies, rip them, and return them. You're still looking at like a $5-$10 production cost, depending on time, media, and rental fees, though, so it may or may not make sense for you. Plus, you'll end up with a DVD that is not an exact copy. Until dual layer DVDs are the norm at reasonable prices for media, making reasonable copies of production DVDs is probably neither cost effective nor actually an exact copy. There, MPAA, I said it, okay? Go 'way!
Is it legal to make backup copies of your DVDs? It's a bit of a mystery. Technically, DVDs should be copiable under fair use, because you bought a DVD (purportedly), and should be able to do whatever you want with it, including format shift it. However, cracking the CSS encryption on a DVD is not legal. Interestingly enough, what you could do is use your software DVD player to decrypt the contents, then go ahead with the rest of this. (Basically, you fire up the DVD player and start playing, stop, and then explore the drive in Windows Explorer.) The reason that's legal is because you've paid the DVD tax when you got the DVD player software. I'm going to show an alternative to that, but it's really that simple.
Get the hardware.
DVD ripping will need fast disk, lots of disk space, good CPU performance for encoding, and good memory. The better the hardware, the happier you'll be with the process. I'm using the following hardware for my test:
Hardware involved:
- Athlon 64 3200+
- ASUS K8V KT400 motherboard
- 1 GB PC3200 DDR SDRAM
- 2x Western Digital Raptor 10,000 RPM SATA drives, RAID 1
- NEC DRU 2500A 8x dual format DVD burner (recording)
- Lite-On 8X DVD-ROM 52X CD-RW 5232K (reading)
The above hardware is probably above what the average user currently has. As hardware gets faster and faster, this process time will shrink. I'm using pretty up to date components, so this should give a good ball park time frame. Your results could be a little bit faster, or significantly slower.
I will also be burning to a Memorex 4X DVD-R medium. As I have an 8X burner, I am not burning as fast as I could be. 8X media is still a little hard to find, and is certainly not as cheap as 4X media. No overclocking of any kind here!
Get the software.
For this test I downloaded and used two pieces of software. These are available absolutely free, but you may have to check your local laws regarding how legal they are to use in your jurisdiction.
Software involved:
- DVD Decrypter 3.2.2.0
- DVD Shrink 3.1.4
DVD Decrypter will be used to rip the contents of the DVD to the hard drive. It can optionally de-CSS the disk as well, but look above for how to do what this program does, without even using this program if you worry about the legality. This program is useful because it takes care of it all in one place.
This is not a clean test. I am running a lot of memory resident programs, and am typing this document at the same time as doing this work. I have a rather large background image as well. The hard drive may be fragmented, as I've been doing a few rips. Hence, there are quite a few optimizations I could do to be less resource-intensive, but I wanted this to be a good field exercise for how long it would take me to rip a movie.
Outline the process.
The following steps have to be covered:
1) DeCSS the DVD, and rip contents to hard drive.
2) Re-author with just the main feature.
3) Burn to a new DVD.
The first step will be handled by DVD Decrypter. The second two will be handled by DVD Shrink.
If you are just ripping the contents to your hard drive, and not burning a DVD, just stop after using DVD Decrypter. You can use most software DVD players directly on the files, once they're on your hard drive.
Lab notes.
Here are the notes from my DVD burning test.
[0:00]: DVD inserted into the Lite-On DVD-ROM, and DVD Decrypter run. I select to extract in file mode, and start the process. Read rate is slow, beginning at 3x or so, and increasing. It never reaches 8X. Total time until finished is around 17 minutes.
[0:17]: DVD Shrink is run, causing it to analyze the video. This takes about a minute, including displaying a preview. I re-author the DVD and only add the main feature. I then switch off any extra languages, other than English language and English subtitles. Even after all that, the movie has to be recompressed down slightly, apparently. Oh well. I click the Backup button, and the encoding starts. Total time is around 12 minutes.
[0:29]: Time to burn the DVD. Even though it's an 8X burner, we're forced down to 4X because of the medium. Total time was around 15 minutes.
[0:44]: DVD finished! Total elapsed time was around 44 minutes from start to finish.
There you have it -- without doing any system optimization, I'm able to turn around a copy in just under three quarters of an hour.
Analysis / conclusions.
It is easier than ever before (and cheaper than ever before) to rip and copy a DVD. I can do it in well under an hour, at less than a dollar in medium costs. The actual cost is higher, because it takes time and computing resources, but you can expect both to go down in the not too distant future.
What's more, there are many things I could do right now to speed up this process. This wasn't a race -- it was a test, to see on average how quickly a copy could be turned around. Here are some quick things that could have marginal improvement on my total time:
- Rip the DVD in the NEC, not the Lite-On. At the time of this test, I didn't realize that my DVD burner was actually faster than my DVD-ROM. Hence, I ripped on an 8X reader, instead of a 12X reader. Woops!
- I didn't turn off memory resident software. I run a lot of programs in the background, from antivirus software to a virtual window manager. I also have lots of visual effects eating away at CPU cycles, such as WindowBlinds and background images.
- I left video previews on when using DVD Shrink. I could probably eke out a better time, especially in the encoding, if I turned that off.
- I'm using 4X media, not 8X. Plus, this is DVD-R media, not DVD+R. Not having done a comparison, I have no idea if there's a benefit to using one or the other in terms of speed or reliability.
I'm betting that another fifteen minutes could be dropped with these changes.
These results are quite different from my previous experience with DVD writers. On my work computer, which is a single drive computer, I find that burning a DVD totally cripples my system -- it's unusable until the DVD writing is done. This test machine, on the other hand, can not only burn a DVD, it has enough cycles for me to play music and surf the web at the same time, comfortably.
Considering the prices of 8X DVD writer drives is down to $83, and 4X media is under a $1, it's quite reasonable for the average consumer to use this technology.
However, you can look forward to even more technological and market-driven advances. Who would have thought that you could buy a 52X CD-R drive for $30? It didn't really cross my mind two years ago, but now, it's a reality. DVD writers will be much the same if nothing changes. However, there are some new developments. For instance, dual layer DVD writers are starting to make an appearance. You can buy a DVD burner that is firmware upgradeable to support dual layer DVD media for under $120. You may not be able to get dual layer media, but the hardware is starting to show up. Blu-ray is also starting to make waves, offering 25 GB per single layer disc, or 50 GB for dual layer. It's getting interesting, with commitments announced from Sony, TDK, HP, and others, meaning that this new technology should gain wide adoption.
Given the price point of current technology, and the realization that newer, better technology will always be around the corner, I think it's a good time to go ahead and buy a DVD burner. If you've been waiting, wait no more. Buy one today and enjoy it, because in two years, you'll probably be ready for the Next Big Thing®. Plus, by that point, the technologies should have made things affordable for the common man. And there will be much rejoicing.
References for more information.
VideoHelp.com: formerly DVDRHelp.com and before that VCDHelp.com, it's the de facto reference for all questions regarding burning.
DVD Decrypter: DVD ripping software.
DVD Shrink: Easy tool to re-author a DVD and shrink to fit on one piece of media. Plus, it's completely free.
Posted by John at May 6, 2004 08:57 AM | TrackBack