Comments on: Backing up Disney DVDs

By: AC2

AC2 — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 15:51:07 +0000

Awesome stuff! Was using Brasero to copy to ISO file and then Handbrake to rip but was stuck with the structure protection…

Created the .iso using the ddrescue command above, tried playing it using VLC to check and then used Handbrake to rip to H264 MKVs, worked very well indeed!

Oh yes, see the Title number while playing in VLC to pick up the right Title to rip in Handbrake as the Disney DVDs are littered with fake titles…

Might help mention that ddrescue does take some time to work…

By: Robert

Robert — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 19:45:39 +0000

It worked for me as well. Thank you for publishing that!

By: Nick Anderson

Nick Anderson — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 14:15:21 +0000

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.

By: Conrad

Conrad — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 04:54:57 +0000

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.

By: Nick Anderson

Nick Anderson — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 14:54:28 +0000

@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.

By: monga

monga — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 14:47:51 +0000

DVDFAB 8.1.2.4 no problem
I think anything after 8.1.1.9 handles Thor.

By: AC

AC — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 03:43:18 +0000

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.

By: Reinhard

Reinhard — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 10:25:05 +0000

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.

By: Horacio Reséndiz

Horacio Reséndiz — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 19:37:45 +0000

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!

By: Horacio Reséndiz

Horacio Reséndiz — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 15:07:09 +0000

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!