Review: DVD X Copy and DVD X Copy XPress

Dom · Sep 8, 2003, 06:45 PM

Now that DVD burners have reached a price that many people can afford, a lot of software to use with those burners has been hitting the streets from various companies. One of the competitive software markets seems to be the DVD movie archiving market. Obviously, this market is associated with people who have DVD movie collections that they have invested a lot of money in, so they feel it would be worth making a backup copy of all (or at least their favorite) DVDs in case something happens to them. 321 Studios is one company that is competing in the DVD burning software business. They have a few different products, and today I will be focusing on two of them, both being DVD archiving applications. First, I will take a look at DVD X Copy XPress, an application that allows easy and quick archiving of DVD movies. One concern with making a backup copy of a movie is that with today's media, the capaciy tops out at 4.7 GB, which is only half the size of the maximum capacity of a dual-layer DVD movie. Most movies don't actually seem to utilize the full capacity of a dual-layer DVD; however, they often use more than 4.7 GB of data, which means two discs would be needed any way. DVD X Copy XPress attempts to alleviate this problem by compressing the data to make it fit on one disc. I will also examine the standard DVD X Copy, which allows for a complete and perfect copy of a DVD movie, according to 321. The company actually changed the way they sell these products since we received our licenses. No change has been made to XPress, but 321 Studios no longer offers DVD X Copy by itself. They actually sell two different versions of DVD X Copy - Gold and Platinum. The Gold version basically just combines XPress and DVD X Copy into one package, and the Platinum package simply builds on the Gold package by offering more customization of the DVD archiving process.

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