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-------------------------------------------------------------- This story was printed from CNET Asia. --------------------------------------------------------------
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Four DVD-copying apps compared
By Jon L. Jacobi and Don Labriola
01/01/1970 URL: http://asia.cnet.com/reviews/hardware/storage/features/0,,39152534,00.htm
No doubt you've been flooded in the past year with e-mail and advertisements touting a "remarkable" piece of software that backs up commercial DVD movies to CD or even to another DVD. Curious? Considering the murky legal issues, you should also be cautious. We'll discuss the issues and the products.
The bad: Won't duplicate copy-protected discs. The bottom line: DVD Copy is one of the fastest and easiest-to-use DVD-copying programs on the market.
InterVideo DVD Copy is a superbly designed program that lets you back up DVDs and most types of CDs with just a few clicks. It boasts an elegant, easy-to-master interface, a concise but well-chosen feature set, and best of all, sizzling performance. Like Pinnacle's competing InstantCopy application, DVD Copy offers format-translation capabilities that make it easy for anyone who doesn't own a DVD burner to copy DVDs to CDs. Also like its Pinnacle rival, DVD Copy won't back up copy-protected DVDs; only DVD X Copy can make a legal backup copy of a commercial DVD.
You begin by choosing source and target devices and selecting an output format. The program analyzes your selections and reports the number of pieces of blank media you'll need. You can easily change the media count by changing the source, target, or output medium. In most cases, DVD Copy will automatically configure its copy settings to burn as quickly as possible, but two buttons, Properties and Customize, let you fine-tune to your preference. These buttons offer fewer choices than Pinnacle InstantCopy's extensive Details section, but what's there is useful--and less intimidating to newbies. Once you have everything in place, you simply click the Start Burning button to begin copying.
Features
DVD Copy can't read or create compressed ISO disc-image files (a common type of file used to exchange video content on the Internet), but it easily handles the more common type of ripped DVD image--multiple files stored in a video_ts folder. The program also boasts the unique ability to combine several such folders into one job. This lets you rip multiple movies to your hard drive one at a time, then burn them together as a single title. Whenever necessary, DVD Copy compresses DVD-Video content written to CD or to a single piece of DVD media, automatically deciding how much compression is needed to produce the best-looking results. It can also generate a perfect uncompressed (1:1) copy of any disc that's small enough to fit on one DVD, and it can back up a dual-layer disc without compression by splitting it between two pieces of DVD media. In the latter case, all menus and navigational controls are copied to both discs. DVD Copy's modest selection of optional features let you set a few easy-to-understand parameters such as the size of your blank media and the name of your output disc. The program's Customization panel lets you preview each movie chapter and omit any that you don't want to copy. This step can save you some disc space, but editing is limited: you can't remove subtitles or extra audio tracks, nor can you modify navigational restrictions that prevent viewers from performing functions such as fast-forwarding past an FBI warning screen.
Performance And Support
During our hands-on evaluation, DVD Copy ranked first in every benchmark, often by a ridiculously wide margin. It compressed an unprotected 8GB dual-layer DVD onto a single piece of Verbatim 4x DVD+R DVD media in 1 hour, 20 minutes, easily beating Pinnacle InstantCopy's 2-hour-and-5-minute results. It performed a 1:1 (uncompressed) copy of that same disc to two pieces of DVD media in less than 27 minutes, compared to slightly more than 50 minutes for 321 Studios' DVD X Copy. The margin was narrower when burning a 60-minute DVD-Video movie to VCD, producing a 1-hour, 13-minute result compared to 1 hour, 26 minutes for 321 Studios' DVD Copy Plus. The difference in actual elapsed time was greater because DVD X Copy's process required more steps. In all cases, our testbed was configured with a 2.5GHz Pentium 4 processor, 512MB of PC800 RDRAM, and a 7,200rpm Western Digital Caviar hard drive. We copied content from a Pioneer DVR-A05 to a Sony DRX-500UL DVD-rewriter. DVD Copy's output quality was competitive with that of any of other program we've tested. When copying our dual-layer test disc to a single piece of media, video was squeezed to about 60 percent of its original size. The resulting degradation was obvious on our test setup--a 57-inch Hitachi SWX20B rear-projection HDTV and progressive-scan Panasonic CP-72 DVD player--and nearly identical to the output produced by InstantCopy. Many users would find the loss of picture quality acceptable when viewed on a smaller monitor.
InterVideo's Web site provides access to upgrades and patches, as well as to a small number of FAQs and e-mail support.
The bad: Has trouble with episodic titles; may be deemed illegal by a current court case. The bottom line: DVD X Copy is the only commercially available application that can make perfect backups of even copy-protected DVD movies.
Unlike most disc-copying programs, DVD X Copy does only one task, but it does it well: It creates perfect--and arguably legal--backups of DVD-Video discs, regardless of whether they're copy-protected. Some consider any such application to be a piracy tool rather than a backup utility, but 321 Studios has gone to great pains to make DVD X Copy a legitimate product. With so many free disc-hacking utilities available on the Internet, DVD X Copy's elaborate antitheft safeguards make it an unattractive alternative to anyone interested solely in indiscriminate copyright infringement. But its intuitive interface, simple procedures, and great-looking output make it the best choice we've seen for producing lawful, high-quality personal backups of your delicate DVD collection.
DVD X Copy's interface is a no-brainer. In most cases, you merely insert a DVD, click a Copy Now button, and swap discs when prompted. The program offers a few settings that let you enable detailed log reports, rename your output disc, skip to the second disc in a two-disc backup, and choose where to store temporary files on your hard drive. It also lets you specify whether you want a copy to begin playback by displaying the root menu or by starting the movie itself. Most users will usually leave these options in their default settings.
Features
Of course, those copies consume as much space as the originals, and because mass-replicated DVDs often contain two layers of data, that means you'll need two single-layer DVDs to fit it all. DVD X Copy automatically determines the best way to divvy up content and if possible, it will keep the entire movie (sans special features) on one piece of media. It also lets you save space by omitting certain types of unwanted content, but it can sometimes be tricky to figure out exactly what you're deleting. DVD X Copy also tries hard to avoid illegal copyright-protection cracking by employing elaborate antipiracy safeguards. Copied DVDs are still protected by most of the content-protection mechanisms contained in the source disc, including Macrovision technology and region coding. It does not, however, retain CSS copy protection. Before each session, you'll have to declare that you've legally purchased the disc you want to copy, and when you're done, DVD X Copy deletes the temporary disc image it created on your hard drive so that no one can use it to create more copies. DVD X Copy also inserts a banner screen into the first disc of each copy that, like an FBI warning, must be displayed whenever the disc is played. The banner also prevents users from using DVD X Copy to make copies of the copy, and it's imprinted with an invisible digital watermark that contains the license and registration information associated with the copy of the program used to produce the disc. In the event of an alleged infringement, this embedded data can be used to identify the person who made the original copy.
Performance And Support
The program did have problems with certain episodic discs, which contain several short features instead of one long movie. It couldn't, for example, copy the Six Feet Under compilations, which pack four hour-long episodes onto one disc. But it had no trouble with test discs that contained sets of 30-minute segments.
DVD X Copy ships with minimal printed documentation and only a brief help file tutorial. But the program is so easy to use that we didn't need much more. The company's Web site provides a good knowledge base of FAQs, as well as links to support forums, free downloadable updates, and e-mail support. Instant messaging with support personnel is planned for the near future.
The bad: Mediocre performance; problems with some audio soundtracks and copy protection. The bottom line: Despite a few growing pains, Pinnacle InstantCopy is a flexible, friendly tool for copying most types of DVDs and CDs.
Pinnacle InstantCopy is a point-and-click DVD-copying application that makes it easy to back up DVDs and CDs without worrying about what's going on under the hood. Its deceptively simple interface masks a flexible feature set and a broad range of disc-copying options, from backing up DVDs to duplicating audio discs or console games. InstantCopy isn't nearly as fast as InterVideo's competing DVD Copy program; it can't back up copy-protected DVDs (a feature that may not be legal), and unless you can make an uncompressed 1:1 copy, its output always loses a little picture quality. But in most other ways, it's a powerful, novice-friendly tool for backing up your delicate and expensive collection of DVDs and CDs.
It doesn't take long to discover the power beneath the hood. InstantCopy lets you designate up to 16 simultaneous recording devices for each job, and your copy source and destinations can be almost any combination of CDs, DVDs, and disc images stored on a hard drive or a removable storage device. In most cases, InstantCopy will use your choice of source device and recording media to figure out the type of task you're trying to perform. But you can override its default selections by clicking a Details button that displays a wealth of additional options. Pinnacle manages to organize the potentially overwhelming number of jargon-laden selections into logical, tabbed dialog boxes that let you perform functions simply by clicking check boxes and choosing items from drop-down lists.
Features
The Details section also provides preset Profiles that let you automatically set multiple recording parameters with a single click. The several-dozen standard Profiles configure the program for output formats as diverse as Karaoke-CDs, PhotoCDs, and mixed-mode CD-Extra discs. You can also create and save your own profiles. The biggest hole in InstantCopy's feature set is its inability to duplicate copy-protected DVDs, which account for the overwhelming majority of discs that most people want to back up. Pinnacle deliberately omits this function, since it's not yet clear whether circumventing a DVD-Video disc's copy-protection scheme is ever legal. (For more information about this issue, check www.protectfairuse.org.) The company does, however, coyly note that InstantCopy can burn discs from any unprotected DVD image file, regardless of how that file was created. We ran into several limitations that were not apparent from the program's product literature. InstantCopy can perform true, uncompressed (1:1) DVD-Video backups only if the entire title fits on a single piece of blank media. (The program always, of course, makes perfect copies of DVD-ROM discs.) In all other cases, DVD Copy compresses DVD-Video to fit it onto the target DVD or CD, which always causes some degradation. The video on our test disc was squeezed to about 60 percent of its original size in order to fit on a 4.7GB DVD, and the difference in picture quality was glaringly obvious on a 57-inch Hitachi SWX20B rear-projection TV and a Panasonic CP-72 progressive-scan DVD player. The degradation would be far less noticeable on a more forgiving setup or on most computer monitors. We also found that InstantCopy can't currently handle DVDs that contain only PCM audio tracks, which is true of many homemade discs. Pinnacle plans to correct this bug with an update this fall, but in the meantime, it shouldn't affect the program's ability to copy commercial DVDs, almost all of which have Dolby Digital-encoded soundtracks.
Performance And Support
In addition to the usual driver downloads and patches, the Pinnacle Web site contains an adequate, searchable knowledge base of product FAQs. The site also lets you set up a personalized support area, where you can monitor outstanding support queries. E-mail support is prompt--a support question sent late on a Friday evening received a reply early the next morning--but unhelpful. The answer consisted primarily of links to Pinnacle knowledge base entries, but none were relevant to our problem.
The bad: Poorly integrated modules; phone support quality is spotty. The bottom line: For those without a DVD burner, DVD Copy Plus's excellent tutorials make copying DVDs to CDs easy, even for novices.
321 Studios' DVD Copy Plus isn't your typical disc-copying program. Instead, it's a collection of high-octane, special-purpose utilities that together can be used to copy DVD movies onto CD--either VideoCD (VCD) or Super VideoCD (SVCD). Although all the applications in this suite are available as free downloads, they're hard to use and have limited tech support. DVD Copy Plus unifies the package with an interface, tutorials, and generous support options. While the package is still challenging, it offers incredibly flexible DVD copying--even for newbies. If you want to back up DVDs and don't have a DVD burner (or the patience to deal with multiple freeware utilities), this S$175 (US$50) package fits the bill.
The DVD Copy Plus interface makes a valiant attempt to combine several very different applications into a seamless package. While the program still feels loosely joined--for example, the various program interfaces aren't standardized, and there's no way to access one program from another--the built-in tutorial saves the day. It does a good job of explaining how to rip a DVD, compress the ripped content into MPEG files small enough to fit onto CDs, then burn the results. Once you complete all 15 short lessons, you can skip the interface (other than to access 321 Studios' Web site) and run component programs separately.
Features
The powerful disc-ripping utility SmartRipper can copy all or part of any DVD-Video disc to your hard drive. It includes some legally questionable options, such as removing region coding and Macrovision, and some flat-out forbidden actions, such as removing CSS copy protection. But SmartRipper also offers many more legitimate features, such as the ability to rip each chapter of a movie into a separate video file. The steep learning curve is worth it. DVDx can compress SmartRipper's disc-image output into standard MPEG-1, MPEG-2, or AVI files that can then be burned onto VCD or SVCD discs using PowerCDR Express. Its sophisticated feature set includes the ability to translate European PAL video to the North American NTSC format, and it automatically selects its compression rate to ensure that the size of its output doesn't exceed the capacity of your blank media.
Performance And Support
DVD Copy Plus required a total of 1 hour and 27 minutes of computer time to copy an unprotected 60-minute DVD to VCD (9 minutes to rip, 56 minutes to recompress, and 22 minutes to burn), which equated to about 1 hour, 45 minutes of total elapsed time. Our 2.5GHz P4 testbed was configured with 512MB of PC800 RDRAM and a 7,200rpm Western Digital Caviar hard drive, and we copied content from a Pioneer DVR-A05 to a Sony DRX-500UL DVD-rewriter.
In addition to an online knowledge base of troubleshooting FAQs, 321 Studios offers unlimited, moderated Web-based forums, and links to software guides, user chat boards, and other online resources. The company also promises to add real-time support via instant messaging. (This feature wasn't available at press time.) However, while 321 Studios' online forums include postings about DVD Copy Plus, they're primarily oriented toward newer products such as DVD X Copy.
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