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The Curse of the Mollusk People?! Of all the clunkers that Hollywood has turned out, why would you possibly want to copy a movie about mobile glowing clams that enslave the minds of simple townsfolk?
Anyway, whatever movie turns you on, you can't just copy a DVD-ROM version for good reason: Lots of smart engineers, software developers, and designers worked hard to make sure that you can't. Some discs are protected by the addition of unreadable areas on the disc during manufacturing, and other protection schemes involve encrypted key codes that must be present on the disc for it to be recognized by either your player or your computer's DVD-ROM drive.
Sure, some programs on the market purport to create direct copies of DVD movies, but most DVD movies hold more than 4.7GB — in fact, many now cram a whopping 8GB onto a single disc. (After all, commercial DVDs can be mastered with more than one data layer.)
Because current DVD technology can burn only 4.7GB on a DVD-R or DVD+R, those people who pirate programs have two options:
- Spread a single movie across two or more recordable discs, with a nasty pause involved (while you or your significant other is banished from the couch to change the discs).
- Compress the digital video on the disc up to 50 percent so that it can be stored on a single disc, which typically results in a noticeable loss in picture quality.
 | This stuff gets really technical really quickly, so it's not covered in great detail here. Suffice it to say that buying a DVD-R/W, DVD+R/W, or DVD-RAM drive is not a free ticket to a shelf of cheap movies. |
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