Copy DVDs on Mac¶

If your Mac has an internal SuperDrive, or an external DVD burner, you probably already know that you can burn your own videos and data on blank DVD media using applications such as iDVD or Retrospect. But what if you want to make a DVD copy for Mac?

If your DVD lacks the copy protection, you can just follow Apple's instructions for copying a DVD with Disk Utility. But if you want to make a copy of a legally purchased DVD, the instructions will not work any more, because most commercial DVDs are protected by CSS, which is to prevent against piracy. To get around the CSS protection, you must use a utility to remove the protection. This process is called "deCSSing", and is equivalent to ripping an audio CD. To copy a CSS-protected DVD, you need a DVD copy for Mac software (such as DVD-Cloner for Mac). This will allow you to remove CSS encryption as well as region code and Macrovision protection. It usually takes less than half an hour to decrypt a DVD to another volume, depending on the size of the DVD and the speed of your computer and its DVD drive. Eject the original DVD when done. Once you have ripped the DVD to your hard drive, you should be left with a VIDEO_TS folder containing files with .IFO, .BUF, and .VOB extensions. If you want to view the movie and confirm that everything was properly extracted from the DVD, start DVD player, choose File > Open DVD Media, select the VIDEO_TS folder, then click Choose. Thus, you have more or less finished the DVD copy for Mac. If the ripped VIDEO_TS folder exceeds 4.7GB in size, it won't fit on a single-layer blank DVD. In this case, you need to compress some contents. DVD copy for Mac and DVD-Cloner for Mac both allow you to drop the DVD menus and extra features to focus on just the movie, and you can even choose which audio tracks to toss, leaving only the stuff you want to be recompressed to fit on a standard DVD. Then you need a program to restore the degraded copy of the original. In such condition, Fast DVD Copy is recommended.

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Copy DVDs on Mac¶