How To BackUp Your DVD's

How to Back Up Your DVD's by mcp2

First of all you will need:

- DVD Decrypter
- DVD Shrink
- DAEMON Tools



I'm assuming some of you have bought a DVD some time or another, so today you will be able to back them up. I will sub categorize the tutorial by the program you will be using at each point, this tutorial should take no longer than 2 hours MAX and will only require 15 minutes MAX input from you and the rest will be done by your computer.


FIRST, stick in your DVD in your DVD drive but don't let it play.

DVD Decrypter
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DVD Decrypter does what it says on the box, it decrypts your DVD's. DVD Decrypter is one of the most used applications in DVD decypting and is liked allot by the Doom9 community. DVD Decrypter will rip right through 80% or more of copyright protected DVD's.

Open up DVD Decrypter and select your source (your DVD drive), when it has read your DVD it will tell you its region, RCE Protection and the System Protection that is on the DVD but don't worry DVD Decrypter will rip right through them. Next select your Destination, this is where the ripped copy will be placed so make sure the destination is somewhere on your hard drive. After you have selected your source and destination you will select the mode in which DVD Decrypter will rip your DVD, in this tutorial we will be using the ISO mode, to turn DVD Decrypter into ISO mode you simply click Mode >> ISO >> Read R, to complete this section of the tutorial you just have to click the image which looks like a DVD which has an arrow pointing to a hard drive and you're done. You can now eject your DVD from the drive.


DAEMON Tools
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DAEMON Tools is a virtualization utility that can create up to 4 virtual drives on your computer, these virtual drives can be used to play CD/DVD-ROM images in quite allot of formats including ISO, MDS and NRG.

Open up DAEMON Tools and you see nothing happens, thats because it has placed itself in bottom right hand side of your screen as an icon. We are going to mount the DVD ISO on a virtual drive, we do this by right clicking the icon the click on Virtual CD/DVD-ROM >> Device 0: [E:] No Media (the device number and drive letter could be anything), then click on Mount Image, a file browser windows pops up and from there you navigate to where your ISO image is and select it, your computer now thinks that you have placed a DVD into your DVD Drive and will want to play so just exit and you can now go onto part 3 of the tutorial where you will be using DVD Shrink.


DVD Shrink
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DVD Shrink is a tool that will let you re-author your DVD's, it lets you reduce the DVD file size and remove the copy protection and encryption. It reduces the DVD size to fit onto one DVD-R without any visible loss of quality.

Open up DVD Shrink. Click on the Open Disc button and select the virtual DVD drive and click OK. Now what we want to do is reduce the DVD size by re-authoring it, what we are going to do is take out some of the extra features in the DVD like the Extras and Menus so it will fit on one DVD-R. Click on the Re-author button up top an the main window should change, in this DVD we are only going to keep the main movie and nothing more. The right hand pane should be split up into 3 sections Menus, Main Movie and Extras, under Main Movie it should say Title 1, right click it and select Add and the Title 1 should be added to the left pane as well, the left pane tells you what will be on the DVD. Above the right pane there should be two buttons DVD Browser and Compression Settings, click on Compression Settings. One in the Compression Settings view click on Title 1 in the left pane and the right pane should change. The right pane right now is split into 3 sections Video, Audio and Subpicture. Video tells you what the compression rate is, Audio tells you audio streams are in the movie and Subpicture tells you what subtitles are in the movie. Now, we want to reduce the DVD size even more so we are going to untick all the subpictures and any other Audio stream that is not English, you should see that the compression rate has increased because we are removing more features from the DVD. We are finished with our editing now onto creating the ISO file. Click on the Backup button up top and a new window should pop up, this is where we change all the output options. Under "Select Backup Target" there should be a drop down menu, you can either burn the edited DVD onto a DVD, create ISO image, create ISO image and burn it with DVD Decrypter or save the DVD files (VOB's, IFO's etc.) on the hard drive, we are going to select ISO Image File. Under "Select Target Image File" there should be a browse button which should bring up a file browser window where you select your where you want to save the ISO. We are done with the file type now we have to set the DVD Region, click on DVD Region up top, the window should change and Region Free should be selected, if it's not the select and under Provider ID put your name or handle. Making the DVD Region Free will allow it to be played on any DVD player. Now we are going to edit the Quality Settings, click on the Quality Settings button up top and tick the first box and the second box, in the second box's drop down menu select "Sharp (Default)" this will increase the time it will take to transcode the DVD but will result in better quality, you may choose "Maximum Sharpness" if you wish. Next click on Options and select "Run backup in low priority mode" this is if you want to use the computer while it's backing up the DVD. We're nearlly finished now, click on Burn Settings and give the ISO a volume label or leave it how it is. Now that everything has be selected all you have to do now is click OK and it should begin to back up your DVD.

One it has finished backing up your DVD you can right click on the DAEMON Tools icon select Virtual CD/DVD-ROM >> Unmount all drives. If you want to test the ISO file, right click on the DAEMON Tools icon select Virtual CD/DVD-ROM >> Device 0: [E:] No Media >> Mount Image and navigate to the ISO file.

Now that you have seen that the ISO file is fine and working you can now burn it onto a DVD with the burning software of your choice, I recommend Nero.

P.S For some of the DVD's that can't be ripped I suggest your use DVDFab Decrypter instead of DVD Decrypter which is also free.