For the sake of simplicity, I’ll make two assumptions here.

1.) You have a movie DVD which is region free or whose region matches with the region of your drive. Most Macs come with Matsushita DVD drives that use RPC-2 protection. RPC-2 physically restricts access to key areas of the disc if there is a mismatch between the drive and the disc’s region. Overcoming this protection involves patching your drive’s firmware; a path I am personally not comfortable taking.

2.) You are interested in backing up your movie DVD with all its features - like subtitles, special features and menus. You could transcode just the complete movie for playback on your iPod with something like Handbrake, but this post doesn’t cover this scenario.

Lets get strated then.

Copying your DVD:
Download Mac The Ripper, which will allow you to backup your DVD disc in its entirity. It also lets you to selectively copy titles or just extract the main feature from the DVD. Insert your disc into the drive. Let DVD Player launch and verify that it can play the disc fine. Quit DVD Player and launch Mac The Ripper. Click on the “Mode” tab to ensure that its set to Full Disc Extraction.

Go back to the Disc tab, make sure you set the New Region option to ALL and hit GO! You’ll now be prompted for the destination folder for this backup. Give it 45 minutes or so and your disc will be copied to the folder that you specified. Take the disc out, put it back in the jewel case, and keep it in a closet safe from dust, scratches and other discly worries.

Playing back your DVD backup:
The DVD Player application which comes with Mac OS 10.5 (Leopard), does a great job of playing backed up DVDs. Launch DVD Player and from the File menu choose Open DVD Media… (or press Command + O).

It’ll ask you for a path to your “media”, which incidentally need not be a physical DVD disc. Just navigate to the folder where you had copied the DVD. Depending on your disc, there can be several folders and files here, but there will always be a folder called VIDEO_TS. Select it and click Choose and your movie will start playing - you can do everything that you’d have done with a physical disc, including selecting chapters, subtitle language, or viewing special features.

You can also use VLC Player for playback. Select Open Disc from File Menu and in the resulting dialog, select the VIDEO_TS option and browse to the VIDEO_TS folder just like you did with DVD Player.

Hope you enjoyed this post! In future we’ll also cover transcoding you media for playing it back on your iPod or iPhone.

This entry was posted Monday, June 30th, 2008 at 6:59 am and is filed under Software, Tips. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.