Where online to buy hardware for quickly making identical copies of DVDs.

February 9, 2009 2:28 PM

Burnflixing — I want to make be able to quickly make identical copies of DVDs. I have an old MacBook Pro. What's the best burning hardware? Where can I buy it online? I'd like something that doesn't require me to de-encrypt or decode anything.

It need not involve downloading the DVD to my hard-drive. I hear that's a slower method and involves encryption, so if possible, I'd like to avoid that.

posted by JamesJD to technology (4 comments total)

If it is an unencrypted disc, you can put it in your drive, open Disk Utility (applications/utilities), click on the disc in the drive and Select New Image. Save the image to your desktop.
After it finishes ripping to your desktop, you should be able to just put in blanks, select that image in disk utility and Burn it.
posted by ijoyner at 3:01 PM on February 9

If these are commercial DVDs (a la Netflix, as you seem to imply with your question title), then there's really no way around decrypting the content. You'll have to decrypt the content using Mac the Ripper, Handbrake, or Fast DVD Copy, etc. Then once you have the decrypted content stored somewhere you can re-encode it and burn it to a blank using Handbrake, Fast DVD Copy, or Toast (my choice). This it time-consuming and tedious but it works.

What you're asking for is a hardware device that acts as a physical DVD duplication machine. While I've heard of these things being used by the huge pirate DVD copy industry, I've never personally seen one or know of one that interfaces with a Mac. Just attaching a second DVD-R to your MacBook Pro via Firewire (MacSales.com has external DVD-R drives for sale) isn't going to be enough. Because...something has to crack through the encryption on the commercial DVD.

I know it's not the answer you want to hear, but it's how the industry is shaped. Unless you're willing to wade into the expensive and shady world of mass DVD duplicators, you're best bet is going to be use the software tools I outlined above to decrypt, and then re-encode and burn to a blank.
posted by mrbarrett.com at 3:25 PM on February 9

Step 1: MacTheRipper
Step 2: Burn the resulting files using whatever is handy.

"It need not involve downloading the DVD to my hard-drive."

So where exactly would the contents of the source DVD be? Are you planning to just rub the two discs together really fast and hope the data is transferred?

"I hear that's a slower method..."

Slower than what?

"...and involves encryption..."

If you're copying a CSS encrypted DVD, then yeah, you're going to have to decrypt it. Unless you don't want a copy that actually works, or your source DVD isn't encrypted in the first place, then you're welcome to not decrypt it.
posted by majick at 6:27 PM on February 9

DVDs are designed to make what you're thinking about impossible. You can't just do a block-by-block copy of a commercial DVD onto a blank disc and play it in a normal set-top player.

When the DVD format was designed, a critical piece of information (part of the decryption key for the content, IIRC) was put on a part of the disc very close to the inner spindle. On recordable media, this part of the disc is blanked out, so you can't write to it. Hence, making a block-by-block copy will move all the data from normal parts of the disc, but not the key that's written in the un-writable location: a player will look for it there, fail to find it, and spit out the disc. You've basically got a coaster at that point. Some software players might play it, by cracking the content's encryption by brute force, but the majority won't, and it won't meet DVD spec.

So, to actually copy a DVD in any non-trivial sense, you need to decrypt it and then burn the decrypted content. This is why there's the whole "ripping" step involved.
posted by Kadin2048 at 10:32 PM on February 9