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DVD/R's on PC - How do I copy from old VHS (and commercial DVDs?)?

Hi, I'm looking to buy a new PC with a recordable DVD drive.

1.) Can almost all of them record movies from my vhs vcr with standard cables of some type?

2.) Can I copy a movie DVD (e.g. a purchased Concert DVD)? How does a person bypass the copy protection? I probably would only do this for concert DVD's on rare occasions when I don't have time to finish a movie, or to save favorite parts of a concert video.

Thanks very much for any help/tips/hints!!!

Mark snipped-for-privacy@dchs.org (please send a cc: if you get a chance)

--
Mark R. Young
markyoung@chartermi.net
www.geocities.com/resolvingconcerns
Reply to
Acousticat
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Acousticat mumbled:

No; you need a video capture card/device.

AFAIK, only with special electronic devices and/or hacking.

--
E-mail address is fake. Please reply to the group!
Reply to
Chaos Master

Almost any cheap video capture board will do. You may need a Sima box to capture some macrovision copy protected tapes.

google for DeCSS. That's the library that lets you break copy protection and localization on DVDs.

You can copy a DVD without any special tools, if you want a direct copy. You need to break copy protection if you want to extract the movie, or play a European CD in the US....

For region encoding, see

formatting link

Be aware that depending on where you live, there may be severe legal penalties for copying DVDs or breaking the childishly simple encoding... Thank the Hollywood greed for that...

visit

formatting link
and see how it's done.

-Dondo

Reply to
Captain Dondo

Yes, but you'll need more than just the DVD drive, you'll need a video capture card to connect your VCR to the computer. I don't know if there are cheap ones, but I know that there are some frightfully expensive ones. You can buy a lot of movies on DVD for what a good video capture card will cost. Consider the time, too. It's a real-time process - play the tape, record on the computer.

I suspect that if copying videotape to DVD is your goal, you'd get better reliability, probably save some money, and definitely save some hair by buying a stand-alone DVD recorder which is built for just that purpose.

If we told you, there would be no reason for copy protection, would there? However, I get at least one spam e-mail a week telling me that I can copy any DVD on my computer. Want me to forward one to you?

-- I'm really Mike Rivers - ( snipped-for-privacy@d-and-d.com)

Reply to
Mike Rivers

"Acousticat" wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@corp.supernews.com:

No. To do this you need a card with TV inputs suitable for the outputs from your VCR that allows you to record the audio+video streams. Depending on the quality you want you can get a consumer "capture card", or a more expensiv pro card.

Note that there are, or at least there were, some TV cards that can't be used for this. They insert the picture right into the video signal to the monitor.

If it's not encrypted, you can copy it without cracking stuff.

By using an application made for this. There's a bunch of 'em out there. Use Google, or just start reading the spam.

Note: Not all (at least among the older ones) stand alone DVD players can play DVD-R/-RW/+RW discs.

Regards /Jonas

Reply to
Jonas Eckerman

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