How do I copy a DVD movie to DVD-R on a Mac?

April 17, 2008 10:26 AM

MacFilter: Mac DVD copying on the cheap free?

I'm a Mac user now. Hooray!

I want to be able to backup DVDs that I own. (So this is legal, see?) On Windows, I'd use DVD Decrypter and DVD Shrink. The first gets rid of the copy protection, the second squeezes the DVD image down to 4.3GB, the size of a blank DVD.

It's a painless process, and it's free. My goal is to play a copied DVD in ANY player I run across, not just some fancy smancy iPod or XBOX or whatever.

On Mac, I've found MacTheRipper (free) for stripping the copy protection. If the resulting DVD is small enough, I can burn it to a DVD with Burn (free). It plays on any player, and makes me happy.

However, if the DVD is greater than 4.3 GB, I've been unable to find any FREE DVDShink equivilant software for the Mac.

Does such an animal exist?

I keep seeing Handbrake appear in discussion threads, but Handbrake doesn't handle VOBs and VIDEO_TS folders and the like.

Thoughts? Or have Apple fanboys been lying to me all this time?

posted by rentalkarma to computers & internet (13 comments total)

MacTheRipper + DVD2oneX = there you go!
posted by soma lkzx at 10:34 AM on April 17, 2008

DVD2oneX isn't free. (And at 40 euro and current exchange rates, it isn't even cheap.)

(It's also worth noting that if you're in the US, at least, it doesn't matter that you own the DVDs and are backing them up - bypassing copy protection is illegal, period.)
posted by Tomorrowful at 10:50 AM on April 17, 2008

If free is more important than easy, you want mencoder. It takes some fiddling around to get it right, though.

There's also a port of dvdauthor in macports if you're inclined to try that.
posted by majick at 11:05 AM on April 17, 2008

Perhaps not quite the solution you were looking for, but you might consider running those (free) Windows applications within Apple Boot Camp, Vmware Fusion or Parallels Desktop. You might have to buy a Windows license, but having both operating systems is much more flexible than the one.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 11:30 AM on April 17, 2008

I've never seen 'shrink' software for the Mac that's free. I just end up using my PC. Thats the main downside to being a Mac user, a lot of the free software that is available on PC costs money.
posted by mphuie at 11:32 AM on April 17, 2008

I use Popcorn and MacTheRipper. Popcorn isn't free, but it's almost flawless, and lets you only burn the main feature and whatever sound/subs you want, so that usually you don't even need to downsample the image. Worth the $35 that it cost me.
posted by luriete at 11:46 AM on April 17, 2008

I keep seeing Handbrake appear in discussion threads, but Handbrake doesn't handle VOBs and VIDEO_TS folders and the like.

Oh, it handles them fine -- but it's not what you want because it doesn't output DVD format.

Seconding mencoder -- for reading DVDs and outputting a lower bitrate, DVD-formatted copy of the main feature, for free, on a Mac, it can't be beat.

If you would pony up $$, the best choice is decrypting with AnyDVD in a virtualized Windows set-up and then using DVD2OneX.

As far as DVD decryption in OS X, remember that the freely-available copies of MTR are old and decrepit and fail on most modern DVDs. You have to pay for the so-called "betas" in a pretty sketchy manner ("Oh no, it's not commercial, you're just donating...in exchange for a license. But it's not a license fee. It's just a donation."). You might want to try out FairMount, which is free and open source (uses VLC's libraries for decryption).
posted by jbrjake at 12:07 PM on April 17, 2008

Some good info on a post on Lifehacker today, not all Mac but some solutions and honorable mentions too.
posted by fenriq at 12:09 PM on April 17, 2008

What's the problem with using the Disk Utility to make a disk image and then burn the image onto a blank?
I haven't had any problems with that, though I've only played a burnt dvd on another computer.
posted by princelyfox at 1:16 PM on April 17, 2008

You may want to check out Visual Hub . Not free but a really GREAT video conversion prog
posted by ShawnString at 1:22 PM on April 17, 2008

> What's the problem with using the Disk Utility to make a disk image and then burn the image onto a blank?

If you're making the disk image directly from a commercial (i.e. encrypted) DVD, the copy that you make will not play back on most set-top DVD players.

This is because the DVD content is encrypted -- weakly -- with a key that's stored in a a special area of the disc, which doesn't get picked up when you make an image of it. So you'll copy all the content with this method, but not the key.

However, the reason the copies still work when played back on the computer is because the encryption scheme is so weak, lots of computer playback programs will just brute-force the encryption if they can't find the key. However, most set-top boxes will not do this, and neither will some DVD player programs for the computer. (E.g. Apple DVD Player won't do it, I don't think, but VLC will.)

There's really no point to doing this, IMO, because if your intended playback device is a computer rather than an STB, you might as well forgo burning the movie back to a DVD and just compress it to Divx or MP4 or some similar format, meaning that it'll only take up 600-800MB or so, and keep it on a hard drive.

Also, and more significantly, if you do it this way, you run into problems if you have a dual-layer DVD and you want to copy it onto a single-layer DVD-R. Obviously there's just too much content to fit.

In order to produce a copy that's as flexible as possible (plays everywhere), and also can be burned to a single-layer blank DVD, you need to extract the content from the original disc in decrypted form (using MacTheRipper or similar), and then you need to squeeze it down to 4.3GB. There are a bunch of tools for this latter task, including Popcorn and DVD2OneX. There might be some free tools to do it on the Mac as well, but I can't remember any of them off the top of my head.

And yes, this is all illegal in the U.S., so I'm only telling you this so you can do it while you're on vacation in Europe, which is naturally where I learned it all.
posted by Kadin2048 at 2:31 PM on April 17, 2008

MactheRipper and Burn
posted by nameless.k at 2:45 PM on April 17, 2008

I always use mactheripper and toast - which does the shrinking and the burning. Toast isn't free, but it's definitely worth having/paying for.
posted by kpmcguire at 9:28 PM on April 17, 2008