Backing Up DVDs

From Zanecorpwiki

Backing up DVD encrypted--even one's you own--may be considered illegal. Not all commercial DVDs are encrypted, though so the US government has only partially fucked on behalf of Hollywood and their misguided clinging to a dying business model. But I digress.

DVDShrink does a good job, but it only works on linux. There's a number of tools to shrink DVDs on linux, and unfortunately none of them I've found make a pure lossless copy except one: dd.

'dd' is a bit by bit disc copy and can be used to make a an image file. However, you need deCSS libraries to read encrypted DVDs (and even with the library, it may be illegal). Even with deCSS libraries, many recent DVDs come with additional copy protection that introduce other problems. One tactic is to introduce bad sectors:

dd if=/dev/dvd of=dvd.iso conv=noerror,notrunc,sync

Many linux players can read the image files directly, and if not, you can mount the image file with:

mount -t iso9660 -o loop image_file.img /mnt_point