Let's assume you just went out and bought a DVD burner and some blank, high quality DVD+R disks. Now what?
Well, it depends on what you want to do with your burner.
Most burners come with free software for burning DVD's. Most are stripped down versions ("lite" is the word most used) of commercial software that the manufacturer hopes you will upgrade to the full version.
If your goal is to backup data from your computers, the free software will probably be just fine. If you are making your own home movies with a digital recorder, the software that came with your camera may have the program you need.
If you want to make copies of commercial movies, you will want a different kind of software that we will talk about later.
In most cases, you will probably want to upgrade to a quality DVD burning software. There are several of these products on the market, including good ones made by Roxio and NTI. But, the king of CD and DVD burning software is Nero, made by Ahead Software. The major testing labs such as PC World and CNet give Nero their Editor's Choice Award as the best of its class. I couldn't agree more. Nero can handle just about all your needs for DVD and CD burning.
The latest version of Nero is V6.6. It includes the ability to make dual layered copies if you have a dual layered burner. The dual layer drive is fairly new to the market, so whether you buy Nero or some other brand, make sure the edition you buy has that capability.
The one thing that Nero, or most other commercial burning software, for that matter, cannot do by themselves is make working copies of commercial DVD's that you rent at the video store. If you wish to do that, you need a special software that skirts the edges of legality.
The copying of commercial DVD's is a legal nightmare. Hollywood folks will tell that any kind of copying of their materials is illegal. They may or may not be right. A couple of years ago, they won a victory to stop the sales of a product called DVD XCopy, which was sold under the premise that people who buy commercial DVD's have a right to back up their own DVD's. The courts disagreed and said the product could be used to make illegal copies for sale. The product went off the market and company went out of business.
Recently, a California ppellate court ruled that software that copies commercial DVD's is legal, as long as it does not include a method to break the copy protection on most DVD's (most commercial DVD's are copy protected with a system called CSS).
However, since free CSS decryption software has been available for several years and can be found at hundreds of locations for free on the Internet, it is easy to integrate the decryption software with the burning software. The appellate court also ruled that since CSS decryption software is so widely available, CSS itself may no longer qualify for "Trade Secret" status.
There are several products on the market that can make copies of commercial DVD's...the best one probably being 1Click DVDCopy or DVDX Platinum. They also make it easy to integrate CSS decryption. For your information, it was a 15 year-old Norwegian lad who first published the CSS decryption software on the Internet. He was later acquitted in a Norwegian court of all criminal charges for doing so.
Now, at this point, I must say that my providing you with this information does not mean that I advocate in any way the copying of copyright-protected materials such as DVD's. I believe that at this moment in time, this kind of copying is still illegal and that commercially produced DVD's are protected by our current copyright protection laws.
That being said, in tomorrow's final installment, I will tell you about a friend's experiment with a free CSS decryption software called DVDShrink and how he uses it and Nero to back up his commercially produced DVD's.
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