Can you record DVD's with dvd recorders?

God, I love the sweet irony inherent in that perfectly valid and honest question.

You might want to specify in greater detail what exactly you want to record. Do you want to make exact duplicates of store-bought DVDs? Do you want to record your own home movies onto a DVD? (etc.) I don't know the answers to those questions exactly, but I'd guess more specificity would help those who can answer your question.

As I understand it - you cannot copy store DVD's to DVD-R (+R, +RW or whatever), since the pressed DVD's are dual-layer and the recordables are not.

I've not got a recorder, but that's my understanding.

Paul

Yup.... as he just said. You can rip vob files and edit them and write a DVD to 2 DVD-Rs, but a disc image is about 7GB or more usually. DVD-R is just 4.7GB so it won't copy.

Of course, in the very recent thread about DVD recorders there was already a bit of discussion about that. How to do it, what programs were used, etc.

I rip store bought DVD Videos to my hard drive, re-encode them, and record them to 1 dvdr backup. Quality is really the same to me. I'd say it's like comparing a 256kbps cbr mp3 to the actual CD wave file. Pretty damn close, but I guess if you're one to stare at the screen at every damn single detail, then you could possibly see a difference.

PS2 DVD games you can do 1:1 copies and play with a modchip (easiest dvd backup to do)

Xbox DVD games you can copy to the xbox hard drive, or ftp to the xbox, and then copy the dvd to your pc hard drive, then make a backup and use with a modchip.

I've done them all, everything work's great for me.

Here is a pretty good FAQ that deals with the following 3 scenarios...

"There are 3 options, if you have:

1:/ An original DVD that is Single Layer
2:/ An original DVD that is Dual Layer but the actual movie is small enough to fit directly into a 4.3GB DVD-R. (ie the DVD is full of extras that you can lose)
3:/ An original DVD that is Dual Layer and the actual movie is NOT small enough to fit directly onto 4.3Gb. "


Quoted from the following page:

http://www.vcdhelp.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=109346


Sometimes it's just cheaper to buy the movie... Gladiator took about 27 hours to remaster on my PC... Good Luck!!!

That thread looks hella good. Thanks for linking it!

> PS2 DVD games you can do 1:1 copies and play with a modchip (easiest dvd backup to do)

Where can I read up on this? Is there a quick guide to how to make this work?

- Jon

PS2 DVD games you can do 1:1 copies and play with a modchip (easiest dvd backup to do)

Interesting...so you can copy PS2 games. Looks like Nintendo were the smart ones after all.

Can you copy XBox games? I forgot if those were proprietary or also just DVDs

http://www.xboxhacker.net/

a really good site for this type of stuff is...
www.doom9.org
Lots of links to software and guides etc..

Sometimes it's just cheaper to buy the movie... Gladiator took about 27 hours to remaster on my PC... Good Luck!!!

Sometimes buying won't help. I could convert my DVD player to multi-region, but there's still the "it's PAL" issue.

Or, you could take the route I took:

Purchase a modified DVD Player, such as the Panasonic RP-82, from http://www.jvbdigital.com and then pair it with a Panasonic DMR-HS2 set-top DVD-Recorder and produce nearly flawless reproductions at will. The modification provided on the RP-82 strips both CGMS and Macrovision protections, for archival/fair use purposes only, of course.

Granted, it's Digital to Analog, and back to Digital again (two components connected via an S-Video cable) and you loose the "special features" on the disc, such as DD 5.1, menus, subtitles, etc. But who really looks at that stuff more than once anyway?

The beauty of the DMR-HS2 recorder is that it has an internal 40GB drive, so you can dub the source out of the RP-82 onto the drive of the DMR-HS2 and then watch it at will. If you like it, you can then dump it to the onboard DVD-R drive.

While it's true that Philips produces a DVD recorder with component INPUTS, it lacks an internal hard drive, and records on the less-favorable DVD+R/W format, whereas the Panasonic uses the more popular DVD-R format. The DVD+R discs are still quite a bit more expensive. I can get good quality DVD-R media for well under $1 each in bulk.

Before you ask:

No, you cannot dump a commercial DVD directly to the hard drive of the DMR-HS2, they weren't that stupid.

Otherwise, it's so choice... I highly reccommend picking one up if you have the means...

Cheers,

Rob

Sometimes buying won't help. I could convert my DVD player to multi-region, but there's still the "it's PAL" issue.

Most, if not all, of the DVD players I have seen have the ability to output either PAL or NTSC (or something close to them) independant on what the format the disk is. Do DVD players sold in the US not have this functionality ?

records on the less-favorable DVD+R/W format

I'm just going to say that that's pretty subjective, but we've debated this before in another thread I started about set-top DVD recorders, so I'll leave it at that.

*edit*
besides, Sony now makes one that records in both formats, so it doesn't matter.

AFAIK, Sony only makes a PC-based recorder that writes both, and not a set-top box. That's an important distinction.