Hacksar

If you’ve been reading some of our previous posts (primarily the ones on BitTorrent), or even if you have a digital video recorder, you may have noticed that getting the files onto a DVD for easy DVD player playback is much harder that it seems. Almost 99 out of a 100 times, your DVD player won’t be able to just play a video file if you just drag/drop and burn whatever video file to a DVD. When you do that, you are usually burning a data DVD, which is specially meant for only PCs to read them; DVD players usually can’t.

However, if you ever have wanted to create your own DVD, whether it was a home video or just some other collection of video clips you’ve had, there is a way to do it. What you want to do is author the DVD. When you use DVD authoring programs, you have the ability to set not only the video to play on a DVD player, but also to create aspects of the DVD such as the menu screen, scene selections, and more. There are many programs that can do this for you, the best being free. Keep reading for the list and a quick guide on how to use the best one.

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Everywhere you look, new technology is emerging. Ranging from Blu-Ray disks to FiOS HDTV, the rage these days is quality, quality, quality. But, how important is it, really? Do you NEED to see Laurence Fishburne’s pockmarked face in The Matrix? I’d hope not. Thankfully, plain old DVDs are still here, and are a LOT easier to make backups (aka burn) of.

You may have a booming collection of a variety of DVDs, but may be too frightened to actually remove them from their case, lest they become riddled with fingerprints, dust, and scratches. Many DVDs come with encryption and copy-protection on them, but there are many honest people out there who simply want to make backups of their legitimately purchased DVDs, such as if they are going on vacation, etc. There exist MANY programs out there that can simply make copies of DVDs 1:1; however, that may not be good enough. Virtually all movie DVDs nowadays are dual-layer (meaning they hold 9.4 GB of data), while most DVD burners / blank DVDs you find are single layer (hold 4.7 GB of data). Your computer is your best friend; use it to make backup DVDs of your precious authentic ones without busting your wallet with extremely expensive dual layer disks. Keep reading for the guide on how to both set up and install the necessary programs (one-time) and then the short instructions for the actual copying process.

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