Home Video Asylum

TVs, VCRs, DVD players, Home Theater systems and more.

getting started

There is an article on the DMCA and Fair Use in the current issue of Stereophile.

Here's the way it works. You have the right to make a back-up copy of a DVD that you buy. However, if you try to make an analog copy, Macrovision will either trigger a message in the recorder telling you that copying is prohibited or the recorder (if made after the late '80s) will make an unwatchable copy (light/dark changes, color problems and/or sync issues). And if you make a digital copy, you have to defeat the CSS copy protection. Doing so violates the DMCA law which, by the way, was illegally paid for by the Hollywood studios (bribery and money laundering), although the US Congress refers to this as... campaign contributions.

That said, make sure you have the latest firmware (currently PlexTools v2.24) from Plextor for your writer. I suggest using DVD+R discs and burning them as DVD-ROM discs (using the bit-setting/book-type feature of the +R format) for the best compatibility.

Go to afterdawn.com and look for the links to DVDDecrypter and DVDShrink available as downloads from the afterdawn.com site. Used in combination, these two are still the best DVD copying software tools you can get (and they're free). They are also illegal in the US and several other countries.





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