The Easy DVD Comprehension and Copying Guide

Now before you wonder if this is legal or not. It is as long as you own the DVD. And if you have children with sticky hands you know how dangerous they can be to discs. Even my own mother finds ways to screw up her DVDs and CDs.

To start you must have a DVD burner. You can pick those up from Fry's Electronics, Bestbuy, Circuit City, or my personal favorite Newegg and wherever else technology is stocked by you. When purchasing there are some specifics to consider. There now three types of discs, and yes they matter.

There is a great website where you can check the compatibility of your home DVD player. It is www.videohelp.com and by clicking the percentages you will be taken to a page to see what media is compatible with your home player.

DVD-R/RW

DVD-R/W: The first DVD recording format released that was compatible with standalone DVD Players.

DVD-R: is a non-rewriteable format and it is compatible with about 93% of all DVD Players and most DVD-ROMs.

DVD-RW: is a rewriteable format and it is compatible with about 80% of all DVD Players and most DVD-ROMs.

DVD-R/W: Supports single side 4.37 gigabytes (More to come about that)

DVD+R/RW

DVD+R/W: Has some new features than such as lossless linking and both CAV and CLV writing. (And those features are dependant upon your burner's support for them)

DVD+R: Non-rewritable format and it is compatible with about 89% of all DVD Players and most DVD-ROMs.

DVD+RW: A rewritable format and is compatible with about 79% of all DVD Players and most DVD-ROMs.

DVD+R/W supports single side 4.37 gigabytes (More to come about that)

DVD+R DL

DVD+R DL: A disc with two layers that holds twice as much as +R or –R.

Now if you go to buy a DVD burner you can get a kind that supports all of these formats. Some of the brands people prefer are LiteOn, NEC, Plextor, and Sony. But if you can't afford to get all the features make sure you check to see which are compatible with your personal player by clicking the percentages above or going here.

So now that you have your burner, and now lets go buy the media! Some respected brands are FujiFilm, Sony, TDK, and Ritek. For a good price on Ritek media be sure to check here or here . Some terminology for when buying media. The terms 2X or 4X is the speed at which the discs are burned. If you want to keep errors down then the slower you burn, the better. But you can burn errorless discs at any speed. The term spindle means a stack of media on a spindle with no casing for the individual discs.

Now for those of you who have keen eyes you may have noticed that I said these discs hold about 4.37 gigabytes (which will from here on out be referred to GB) of data, but if you look at the label of the discs they say they hold 4.7GB. This is a marketing gimmick and this is how it works.

The terms of byte, kilobyte, megabyte, and gigabyte are like centimeter, meter, and kilometer, except they measure size instead of distance and they are counted differently. The metric system is based on multiples of 10, it is a bit different for bytes. There are 1024 bytes per kilobyte, 1024 kilobytes per megabyte, and 1024 megabytes per gigabyte.

When you see the term 4.7GB on the package, they're measuring it differently. Their discs can actually hold 4,700,000,000 bytes. They're using a numerical structure of 10 instead of 1024, so remember, you can only hold about 4.37GB of data.

Now lets get you started on your way to DVD burning. Now I won't get into anything too advanced like discs that are too big to be easily copied or tell you what programs you should use for those because as far as I'm concerned they all suck. I may make a guide for that later. But you will need to download a program for this process. It is called DVD Decrypter . Now lets pick a disc to copy! I'll pick a favorite series of mine. You can watch this series here.

Let's make sure it is small enough to be copied.

Since 3.36GB is smaller than 4.37GB we're good to go. Load up DVD Decrypter.

Now follow these steps through the highlights to change the mode to ISO Read.

And now it should look like this.

Click the folder icon shown below to select the directory you want to save the image in, making sure the driver has enough space.

Now that you have a place to put the ISO file, press the DVD > Disk button and let the process complete.

Now that it's all finished, let's change modes again, this time to Write Mode.

Now DVD Decrypter should look something like this. And remember where you saved your ISO and where the tooltip says “Browse for a file,” click there and locate your ISO.

And on the bottom right be sure to select the write speed you want to use. The higher the write speed, the more chances for errors. I always burn at 1X just to be safe.

After all that load up the media you bought. I'm using Ritek 4X media.

And finally click the Disk > Disc button. I suggest not to use your computer too much to keep the errors down and your buffer high. After your disc is done put it in your DVD player and you're all done!