Hey guys, got a question for ya.

I havent done much (...anything) with DVD movie writing, but a friend of mine needs some help, and I said I'd try to find out what I could.

Basically, my friend's daughter had a professional DVD made of her playing softball to send to universities that she's applying to. The DVD has the normal things you'd find on a movie DVD - menus, scene selection, and the clips of her playing.

The company that made the DVD apparently wants to charge a lot for multiple copies, so she wanted to know if it would be possible to make her own copies of the DVD that would have all of the above features.

I'd need to be able to explain in detail exactly what to do to someone who, while computer literate, isnt computer savvy.

Any help would be appreciated! Thanks in advance.

Well there's a lot of trickiness to this. For one, whats the copyright rules? I am gonna guess your friend doesn't own the material, just the content. Get caught copying it yourself before sending to the colleges, could get sued and end up having the girl barred from those schools. Likelyhood is small, but possible.

That being said, there are dvd duplicating machines (which is just another glorified to saying a dvd burner drive) out there a bunch of places will have that can duplicate it. Or your friend could do it themselves if they have a dvd burner and some blank dvd media. Go to www.download.com, select advanced search, and search for "dvd copy" and set the license (how much you pay) to free. Cnets editor picked out DeepBurner 1.7 ( http://www.download.com/DeepBurner/3000-2646_4-10447242.html?tag=lst-0-2 ) as a good choice. Then just copy and go.

How much are they charging, anyway? DVD media isn't exactly cheap and they did go through all the effort and cost of writing the menus and so forth. Not that I'm saying they should pay, but I know if it was my business where I made the DVDs ... I'd definately throw some write protection on there so you couldn't copy them and stiff me.

You know, a friend of mine used to be in this business. I never asked him what he charged.

You could do this quickly and easily. But it's quite illegal. You paid the guy for a service; he filmed her, set it all up, etc. I'd give him his due.

You could do this quickly and easily. But it's quite illegal. You paid the guy for a service; he filmed her, set it all up, etc. I'd give him his due.
From what I understand, she made her own clips of herself playing (or her mom filmed her - but the DVD company didnt do the filming). So the clips themselves weren't made by the company. Basically, they took the clips to the company, and the company just transferred them to a DVD and added a menu and a scene selection.

Does that make a difference?

DVD media's pretty cheap if you ask me. I usually buy Verbatim 4x discs for copying movies at about $0.25-50 per. Jensae, if you just want to make copies of the discs themselves, it's fairly easy to do: as Kelraz said, just download the software and use it to copy the DVD, though I wouldn't suggest sending the DVD to schools if it has a copyright/piracy warning, or if it mentions the company's name.

If it's encrypted (which I doubt - if it is, the burning software you're using will complain), you can almost always deal with that too; it just takes a little more work. First, download DVD Decrypter (http://www.videohelp.com/tools?tool=DVD_Decrypter) and DVD Shrink (http://www.mrbass.org/dvdshrink/). Once you've downloaded and installed both of those:

1. Use DVD Decrypter to pull the video files off of the disc. This will pull all of the menus and video files off of the DVD and place them in a folder on your hard drive (example: c:\My_Disc\VIDEO_TS).

2. Use DVD shrink to create an image from those files. To do this, open DVD shrink, click on the "Open Files" button, and direct it to the folder you saved the files to earlier (using the example above, this would be c:\My_Disc). Once it pulls up the DVD, click on the "Backup!" button. This will bring up a window with a pulldown menu asking where you want to copy to. You'll want to save it to your hard drive as a *.ISO image file (again, using the example earlier, this would be c:\My_Disc.ISO).

3. Use your DVD burning software to burn My_Disc.ISO to a blank DVD. Usually, the burning software will have an option stating something along the lines of "Burn Image to Disc." If you want it to play reliably on a stand-alone DVD player, make sure to burn at a relatively slow speed (I don't suggest anything faster than 6x). Also, be sure to use good media; I've had the most success with Verbatim and Phillips brand media.

If you want to reauthor the disc (that is, if you want to use the video files themselves, but not the menus and other content provided by that company) you'll have a bit more work. DVD Shrink has some reauthoring functionality, but if you can get your hands on a copy of Nero (burning software), I'd suggest using the "Make your own DVD movie" option. It's fairly intuitive; it lets you select the files you want to burn and the order they appear in on the disc, and also lets you set up a generic menu with thumbnails of the video files.