Copying DVDs using free software · Feb 10, 12:36 PM
There are valid reasons for wanting to back up DVDs that you have bought – for example to let children handle discs without risking damaging the original. Users of mainstream OS can easily do this with free software such as DVD Shrink . I look into doing the same using Linux.
I’m using Fedora which has a pretty strong stance on free software – it all has to be Free As In Speech, not Free As In Beer. This stance excludes mp3 support from the basic install. Fortunately, organisations like Livna have appeared and they provide add-ons for mp3 support and other contentious technologies. Like many users, one of the first things I did after installing Fedora Core 6 was to configure it so it could search for, install and use packages from Livna.
I had heard of DVD Shrink and searching for a Linux equivalent led me to k9copy. I tried to install it automatically using “yum search k9copy”, but it wasn’t available, even on Livna. I searched the ‘net for an installable package and found one: k9copy-1.1.0.beta2.
I tried to install the package using “rpm -i” but it complained of a missing dependency: vamps. I’m sure it needed libdvdread and all the KDE libraries too, but I had already installed those.
As hard as I tried, I couldn’t find a ready made package for vamps. But the sources were readily available, so I hoped to build it. I forced rpm to install k9copy, ignoring the missing dependency ‘vamps’: rpm -i —nodeps k9copy-1.1.0.beta2-1.fc6.drpixel.i386.rpm
I tried to make vamps from sources – untarring: tar zxvf vamps-0.99.2.tar.gz I checked the INSTALL file and it said it needed libdvdread installed. I knew I already had this, but for software development rather than just use, you need the header files, which are in a separate package. So I checked the name of the library package – libdvdread – and used yum to install the development package: yum install libdvdread-devel. After that I could build and install vamps easily.
Why do we need such a lot of software? The reason is that bought DVDs come in different capacities. Bought DVDs are large but the DVDs that most computers can write are half the size. So to copy such a DVD you need to be clever and re-compress the video content so it takes less space. That is the gist of vamps:
Vamps evaporates DVD compliant MPEG2 program streams by selectively copying audio and subpicture streams and by re-quantizing the embedded elementary video stream.
I hardly use the DVD drive on my laptop, so I hadn’t been bothered that it was running in slow non-DMA mode. It’s a quirk of my laptop’s early SATA disk subsystem. This meant that access to the disc would bring the machine to a grinding halt, with the mouse pointer barely responsive. I had heard of a fix for this though, adding “combined_mode=libata” to the boot command line, and “options libata atapi_enabled=1” to /etc/modprobe.conf. This worked perfectly.
So, having fixed the disk access, and installed all the software I needed, I was ready to run k9copy. It worked like a dream. I inserted a DVD, ran k9copy, chose open from the menu, clicked on the DVD details to select the whole disc, clicked on the option to keep the original menus, and clicked on the ‘write DVD’ button. I chose a filename to write the new DVD image to.
k9copy with a DVD title set and the option to keep original menus selected
k9copy in progress. The snapshot image is updated every couple of seconds.
Writing a DVD iso image to a blank disc using Gnome Desktop in Fedora Core 6
This part works really well!
Hey
— Chazlyn Feb 28, 04:55 PM #
I AM GOING TO TRY THIS
— MICHAEL ANDERSON Jul 16, 05:15 PM #