Introduction
I finally had a chance to play with DVD wrirting and I am pleased to say it is simple.
DVD burners are available from Pioneer, LG and TDK that are excellent drives.
These drives are often multi format. They can read many types and write many types
look at the specs to figure the pluses and minues of each of the drives.
There are two types (probaby more, but that's do) of DVDs. Video DVDs and data dvds. Data
DVDs are just like CDs just much bigger 4.7GB instead of 700MB.
Video DVDs are the ones you rent at the video store. The catch with copying these is that
they are copy protected using encryption. So before you can copy them you need to handle
the decryption. There are many different ways to copy a video DVD, I am going to describe one.
Copying a Video DVD
It is a three step process:
- Decrypt. This simply removes the encryption from the DVD. This will require you to have
enough free space to copy the encrypted DVD to your hard drive. This can be quite a bit. 6-8GB
depending on the length of the movie. There are lots of programs out there that do this. I use
DVD Decrypter. You can get it from Doom 9 in the download
section. These programs were originally not designed with the thought of copying a DVD so they
by default may not copy all files necessary. I Rip the whole DVD and that way I do not discover when
I go to copy the DVD (after returning it of course) that I missed a file. A few items worth mentioning.
games on the dvd are in files that look just like movies. A DVD with multiple screen sizes such as
wide screen and full screen has the movie actually on the DVD twice.
- Next step is to account for the fact that a Video DVD is often larger than the discs
you can burn. To do this you need to re-encode the DVD. You do loose some quality in the
process but if you are not watching it on a large screen you may not notice. There is a really
good program that does this for you called DVD2One .
Once again you will need a fair bit of hard drive space, maybe as much as an additional
4.7GB. You can choose whether you want to encode the Whole disk or just the movie. You can also
choose the languages, audio and sub titles you want to include. Remember that the movie is going to
be compressed decreasing quality if it is bigger than 4.7GB. So the more you include the higher the
compression, the lower the quality.
- Burning the DVD. Last step is burning the DVD. There are lots of programs out there
that can burn DVDs. I use Nero is the one i use.
Types of Drives
There are really two dominant types of DVD burners on the market today DVD-R and DVD+R.
These two formats are not completely compatible. Media for the two can be different in
price at the retail level. +R is better for random access because of the way the index
to the drive is done. Some DVD drives will read -R and some will read +R. There are also
+RW and -RW which like there CD counterparts are rewritable DVDs.
Future standards
Drive speeds are continuing to increase and media is trying to keep pace with this. This is nothing new and is the
exact same thing that has been happening in the CDR world for quite sometime. Additionally in the next 6-12 months
I would guess that the newer standard supporting 9.4GB will emerge which will remove the need to reencode the movie.
Converting movies to DVD
I have had good success converting DIVX and mpg movies to DVD. I have been using a program called
Sonic MyDVD.
Making Home Movies into DVDs
There are a number of programs out there that you can use to edit home movies and turn them into professional DVDs.
your only limitation will be time, and your imagination.
Adobe Premier is one of the best professional grade video editors.
Pinnacle Studio includes some video editing, ability to
add titles, and transitions.
Ulead Movie Factory includes some video editing, and some titles.
The big trick I found was to able to add chapter points when you want them. The easiest although not particularly elegant way I found to
do it was to crop the parts of a clip into multiple segments adding each segment separately which then allowed you to add
cahpter points where you want. The same clip ends up being added to the video multiple times, but it does work.
These programs also allow you add in still pictures in the form of JPGs (or GIFS or BMPs etc) into the movie as well.
Drives and media
fs
DVDr Help DVD Media section
DVDr Help DVD Writer section