Backing up DVD's with superdrive iMac

[RitchieDeMan]

Like so many others here, I am patiently awaiting my iMac 800 with the superdrive. What I was wondering is if I will be able to make back up copies of my DVD's. If so how would I go about this. I have downloaded a Beta DVD extractor, but am not sure if this is the way to go about it. On Roxio Toast it seems to have the capability of burning such a disc.

Any help on this matter would be greatly appreciated. Many thanks in advance.

[arn]

Backup up DVD's is not an easy thing to do.

First of all, you do need special extraction tools since they are encoded.

Second, commercial DVD's can be up to 9+ gigs in size (dual layer) - and the Superdrive only burns to single layer discs (4.7 gigs).

Here's a good resource though:

http://macdvd.org/lukifer/

arn

[Onyxx]

back ups, eh? hmmmm
just kidding, but arn is right. "Backing up" a dvd may make no sense after all of the pain you have to go through to rip and burn it.

[tomgreever]

Could you not use Disc Copy (or other similat utility) to create a disc image and burn it off onto a DVD?

You really want to "back-up" DVD's? It's not like they're prone to power surges. Maybe you just easily misplace things.

[arn]

Originally posted by tomgreever
Could you not use Disc Copy (or other similat utility) to create a disc image and burn it off onto a DVD?

DVD's are encrypted... so you can't just do a copy.

arn

[lilscoy]

It's easy. Use that dvd extractor to rip the image. Don't extract the mpeg2 files or anything. Just go to "save as" in the menu and save the dvd image. You can't just use disc copy because, like arn says, they are encrypted. What this program does is create an exact image file of the dvd (bypassing the encryption). And this new image is not encrypted itself. Anyway, as long as the dvd image ends up being 4.7 gigs or less, just drag it into toast and burn away. The only pain is, it takes about an hour to rip and an hour to burn. But two hours is not bad at all for a (ahem) "Back-up" dvd.