THEM CLONES

Statutory warning: This article is not to be taken to mean the column is encouraging piracy.

That said, let me add that there are times when you do need to back up those DVDs of your favourite movies in case your careless niece leaves it to the mercy of the dog.

Happily for us, DVD writers don’t cost much these days and with writable DVDs available for as little as Rs 7 per disc, making a duplicate copy of a movie can be an easy home project.

But did you know you can’t really copy a DVD directly as they are protected? That is a problem of sorts. However, there are ways to bend the system, so to say.

The first step is the arm ourselves with a software called DVD Shrink. It’s available for free on the Internet, so all one has to do is to go to http://tinyurl.com/dvdshrink and download it. We need some utilities. So, go to http://tinyurl.com/vobtool and http://tinyurl.com/dvddecrypt. While downloading and installing them, remember to instal DVD Shrink the last. Once installed, set a few preferences. For this, you will need to press Edit and Preferences.
Set target DVD size to DVD 5 (4.7GB).
Check Hide Audio and Subpicture Streams of Insignificant Size.
Check Automatically Open VIDEO_TS subfolders.

Now move on to the Preview Tab, and make sure you select Stereo Stream, not 5.1. Next go to the Output Files tab and put a check mark in Remove Macrovision Protection. Leave the rest of the options as Default and press OK

Once this is done, you can start work on backing up the DVD. Click on Open Disk and you will get a list of available DVD drives on your PC. Select the one that has the movie. Press OK, click on the Open Files button. This will open the Video_TS directory. Select the file that you see. The software will then run some quick analysis. Just let it do its work, which is not a long process.

Once the analysis is complete, we can go ahead and select the movie subtitles that we want to save as well as the sound tracks. DVDs can store data in more than one language on its sound track, but when you want a back up it is possible that you don’t want the French or the Chinese versions. Since all you may want is the version in English, why clog up the disc unnecessarily? The screen is split into five parts. On the left, you can see the disc structure, Menu/Movie/Extras. If you don’t want to the Menu and Extras in the back-up, you can deselect them on the right by unchecking the boxes on the file details. Similarly in the main movie, you can uncheck languages that you feel you don’t require.

On the lower left you will see the preview of the movie, and on the bottom a bar that shows you the disk capacity. If the bar is red, it means you have more content than the blank DVD can hold. You could try deselecting some unneeded options to bring down the size of the file. It it’s green, it’s time to go to the next step

Click on the Backup Button at the top and it will start to make a copy of the DVD’s content. And soon enough, you have the clone of the original disc.

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The Article appeared in the Indian Express, on Sunday, July 6, 2008