Discussion
I got my first DVD writer today (OEM Pioneer 106) and chucked out the old CD-ROM drive so that I now have the DVD as master and a CD writer as slave.
Fantastically, and much to my surprise, it worked first time. XP said 'New hardware found' and that was it. Hurrah! Even Roxio has woken up and the previously greyed-out DVD option is now live. So now I can write DVDS!
Just one problem - I put in a commercial DVD-Video but instead of playing, I got a list of files, none of which would open. I rang one of my 'gurus' and he asked 'What software are you using to play it with?'
Ah.
So the missing software should arrive tomorrow
Bizarre - I can write the buggers but not read them!
Fantastically, and much to my surprise, it worked first time. XP said 'New hardware found' and that was it. Hurrah! Even Roxio has woken up and the previously greyed-out DVD option is now live. So now I can write DVDS!
Just one problem - I put in a commercial DVD-Video but instead of playing, I got a list of files, none of which would open. I rang one of my 'gurus' and he asked 'What software are you using to play it with?'
Ah.
So the missing software should arrive tomorrow
Bizarre - I can write the buggers but not read them!g4ry13 said:
Just make sure you don't try and have Nero and Roxio both installed on your computer at the same time. I lost a whole weekend fixing my computer when my CD drivers became corrupt and could only burn a CD using the windows feature 
I must be lucky - I DO have both installed and they work fine
It's a known fact that Roxio and Nero conflict. At least Nero 5.5 anyway. I have no need for Roxio any more i have Nero 6.0 and it does everything i need it to.AllTorque said:
So can the copy protection on DVD movies etc be circumnavigated if one had the inclination?
Theres quite a funny story that surrounds it. The industry spent a rather large 7 figure sum developing an encryption standard called CSS. About a month after its launch a Russian chap developed a program that was quite clever and quite weighty called DeCSS that removed this fancy encryption allowing DVD's to be copied wantonly.
Effectively a witch hunt started for this Russian fella and whilst DeCSS is still out there on the web this chap is pretty much now been locked down.
In 2001 two MIT students looked at DeCSS in depth and distilled the code to 7 lines of Perl code.
Now thats hardcore programming, dissolving 4 years work and an awful lot of money into a simple interpreted script...
There was a story of a program that did not allow you to copy right protected CDs in american. This university student figured out that if you hold the shift key it by-passes the right-protection and the CDs can be burnt. He passed on this information on the internet. Anyway, the company were going to sue him but the case was rejected. This was only a few months ago.
g4ry13 said:If one were wanting to backup ones DVDs (in case the kids were to damage them or something), one could install a product called AnyDVD to enable the files to be ripped straight from the disk. Not sure about the products to resize to fit blank disks though.
There is a way to copy DVDs but it needs to copy it on to the hard drive first IIRC which can take up about 10gb and it's a long process. I'm not sure how to do a direct copy of a DVD though from one disk straight to another.
john_p said:
DVDShrink.
www.dvdshrink.org/
Yes, it's that good.
So is dvddecrypter - www.dvddecrypter.com
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