Many of you know that I had a son about 6 months ago now. What you may not know is that my wife decided to quit her job and start a home daycare so she could be at home with our son. We all know how hard kids can be on DVDs and the like, so its important to be able to back them up. I am not a fan of the encryption or the new copy protections that have been put in place (ARccOS, RipGuard). These copy protections introduce bad sectors in the DVD, and set top players are supposed to just ignore them. The problem is not all players follow the rules. I’ve got a few cheapo players that just wont play many newer titles because of this copy protection.
Now that there is a swarm of children in the house I have several motivations to backing up my DVDs.
1) I want the kids to be able to use the cheap DVD players. If something bad happens no big deal.
2) I want the kids to use copies of the original DVDs instead of the original. Again burning a new dvd is much cheaper than buying a new one.
3) My MythTV frontends can stream ISOs and thats more convenient, I never have to get up and put a DVD in the player.
So a bit of research and some trial and error I believe I have come up with a pretty easy process.
Packages needed:
- Gnu ddrescue
- dvdbackup
- libdvdcss2
- vlc
- mkisofs
The process:
- ddrescue -n -b 2048 /dev/dvd output.iso
- dvdbackup -M -i output.iso -o dvd_structure
- mkisofs -dvd-video -o clean_dvd.iso dvd_structure
Step 1 copys the DVD to disk block by block but any bad sectors found zero data is filled in. At this point you are left with a DVD iso that has the copy protection removed but the encryption is still intact. Step 2 extract the contents to a directory. This second step leaves you with the structure of a dvd without the encryption. I want to preserve everything about the original DVD (except the copy protection and encryption) so I used the mirror option. This leaves me with all the features and original menus. Step 3 take the DVD structure and pack it up into a nice ISO.
A few things to note:
I took no steps to make the DVD fit on a single layer DVD (4.something GB). If you wanted to do that you should requantize after step 2. To verify that the final ISO did indeed have the encryption removed I un-installed libdvdcss2 and attempted to play the first ISO with VLC. VLC failed to properly play the ISO with only the copy protection removed but succeeded in playing the final ISO. After testing that I reinstalled libdvdcss2.
Process tested on Disney Pixar Cars.
I hope you find this helpful.
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Awesome. Thanks Nick! I was using k9copy, but I like this way much better.
Checkout wodim to burn Isos from cli.
Useful, useful, useful!!!!
I’ve been having a lot of problems with these DVDs. I had always done back-ups using the command ‘dd’ and had no problems, except for Disney DVDs
Now I understand why it’s returning an error. Will try it right away. Thanks!!!
Hope it works out for you
I’m posting back my progress.
Unfortunately this method didn’t work for me.
I tried ‘ddrescue’ , ‘dd_rescue’ , ‘vobcopy’ and
I even used the options: conv=notrunc,noerror,sync
which correspond to the command ‘dd’
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I am just talking about new Disney DVDs
What happens is that every different command either returns an I/O error, or takes a lot of time to be reading and writting ‘zeroes’ where errors are found.
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I might need to try it during the night and check in the morning if it finishes.
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I used “k9copy” to just create an ISO from the main title (movie, that is without the DVD Menu. I still have good quality though)
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I will post again if it works or if I find a workaround. Any suggestions will be appreciated. Thanks!
Update:
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Finally got a work-around to copy new Disney DVDs. Actually I came up with a different way to do it
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I always try to create an ISO image from the DVDs. I must mention, the Disney DVD that was giving me headaches was ‘Alice in Wonderland’ (which I only could create a successfully image with “DVDFab”).
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For all others (or most of them) you can try using ‘dd_rescue’ on Linux. In order to be able to backup the DVD, you must first play it (I did it on ‘VLC’), then hit pause. Now, you can enter on the terminal the following command
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dd_rescue -b 2048 -l OptionalLogFile.log -Afv /dev/sr0 /yourfolder/yourimage.iso
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If it doesn’t work then you need to use for a little bit ‘Windows’, which I hate to get back, but this time it was very helpful. Download ‘DVDFab’, you need to buy it or find an activated edition on your own. Everything else is very easy, you can choose where to save the image, etc.. BTW DVDFab’s version that is able to backup ‘Alice in Wonderland’ is 7.0.6.0. Apparently there a new Copyright code/method Disney is using in their DVDs. Probably it is just this movie. I don’t know yet the details, but it worked for me. Hope it works for you!
Thanks for this blog post! To me it seems to be a robust procedure to get around copy protection in the form of deliberately broken sectors.
I did have a problem though – ddrescue took very long and the DVD drive made noises (probably repositioning the head). I left it reading for over 20 hours on a dual-layer DVD and it still hadn’t quite finished (was at 7.8 GB when I had to interrupt it for other reasons).
I found out that even though ddrescue with the -n option doesn’t try to re-read broken sectors, the DVD drive itself (or driver?) did. Investigating the device mode pages with sdparm, I came up with the following to make it stop trying to read those blocks over and over again:
sdparm –set=RRC=0 /dev/sr0
As I understand it the names of the fields are standardized, but in any case “sdparm –long –long –all /dev/sr0″ will show all pages and fields. Interestingly enough my read-only DVD drive showed no changeable fields while the DVD-RW drive allowed me to set RRC (Read retry count), even though those drives are of the same brand and bought at the same time.
dvdbackup segfaults on the Thor DVD. VLC and dragon player both crash when attempting to play the disc. Plays in a stand-alone dvd player.
I may have purchased my last DVD.
DVDFAB 8.1.2.4 no problem
I think anything after 8.1.1.9 handles Thor.
@monga, this post and discussion centers around backing up the dvds from Linux. afaik dvdfab is a windows program. I will leave the post in case it helps someone but please try to keep correct context.
Thanks for this! I’m in a similar boat with a new baby, 6 months now. This should help protect the old collection.
I finally took the plunge to make a real front-end. Decided to go with XBMC, not MythTV. Although, I already have a Myth Backend setup if I get some free-time. Next time you’re in the market, check out the Zotac boxes with Nvidia Ion. So far, it has been a dream as a front-end and for under $300.
I hope it works out for you. I have found several titles that I had problems with. dvdbackup couldn’t read the TOC correctly. This still seems to work for most movies, I haven’t taken the time to figure out some of those discs.
I have actually switched to a boxeebox and dont have any more myth boxes. The zotac looks cool I might consider running xbmc on that for another room.
It worked for me as well. Thank you for publishing that!