Hollywood's Latest Worry: DVD Burners
from the oh-calm-down-already dept
It seems that Hollywood has nothing better to do than come up with new technologies that are clearly going to destroy their industry. The latest (though, obvious) target on that list is the DVD burner. DVD burners have been around for a while, of course, but this holiday season they're suddenly cheap enough that a lot more people are expected to jump on the bandwagon. Just like the VCR and the CD-R there are a ton of legitimate reasons why someone would want a DVD burner. However, Hollywood doesn't believe that. They believe, of course, that the only reason you could possibly want a DVD burner is to steal movies from them.
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Ya, like back up all the illegal MP3's we have
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Burning movies is not that easy
I bought a Pioneer DVR-A04 drive this year and have yet to successfully copy any 'big name' movies to DVD-R. I have copied a few porno movies, as they tend to be pretty small and don't have much in the way of alternate audio tracks etc. Most 'big name' movies are too big to fit on a DVD-R disc (pressed DVDs can hold up to 9.4 GB, DVD-R/RW/+R/+RW discs can only up to 4.7 GB) so you have to jump through a lot of hoops to make a movie fit on one of the smaller discs. All of the DVD burner help sites direct you to freeware programs that are not very user-friendly and require multiple steps to separate the audio from the video, convert it to different (smaller) formats, combine the audio and video back together, etc. Most of the procedures require the use of 3 or more 'pirate' programs, which often times can't be found as the websites have been taken down.
I can easily copy the movie files to my local hard drive and remove the DSS encyryption in the process, but getting the movie back onto a DVD in a format that a home DVD player will recognize is a lot trickier process.
I've given serious thought to buying 321 Studios DVD copying software, but I'm waiting to see a review of how well it works before I commit.
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