Copy Your DVDs With Mac OS X

Copying your personal movie collection to your Mac is a great way to protect against scratched and lost discs. This is made difficult, however, by copy protection placed on the discs to prevent piracy. Using a few free tools available online, you can build your digital library in no time at all. Follow this guide to learn how.

Steps

Copying an Unprotected DVD

  1. Place the DVD you want to copy into your DVD drive. If it begins auto-playing, stop it.
  2. Find out whether you have enough hard drive space to copy the DVD.
    • Select the DVD in the finder and then press Command+I to get info about the disc. Check out the used space to see how large the disc is.
    • Check your hard disc space. If you have 5 gigs more available space on your hard drive than used space on the DVD, you can continue ripping DVDs.
  3. Open Disk Utility. You can find it in the Applications folder, located in the Utilities section.
  4. Click on the name of your DVD. It should be in the white pane on the left-hand side.
  5. Choose New Image in the disk utility toolbar. A “Save As” dialog box will appear.
    • Name the new image.
    • Choose a destination where you want to save to the DVD.
    • Set the image format (at the bottom; not format) to DVD/CD Master.
    • Set the encryption to None.
    • Click Create and OSX will create your image file with a .cdr extension.[1]
  6. When the file is done saving, eject the DVD. You can watch the movie straight from your hard drive if desired, or convert it and burn a new disc.
  7. Convert the file if you want to burn a new DVD. Once you've created your CD/DVD master as a .cdr file, it's a good idea to convert to .dmg by saving as a compressed format if you want to burn a copy. The .cdr is usually too large.
    • To convert the file, select convert in the top menu. Choose image format "Compressed" and "None" under Encryption. Add a .dmg extension on the file and you'll be ready to burn.

Ripping a Copy-Protected DVD

  1. Download the appropriate software. Because nearly every DVD released has copy protection built-in, you cannot use Disk Utility to make a copy of it. You will need a third-party program that is made to remove the copy protection. The most popular tool is MakeMKV, which is currently available for free.
    • Removing the copy protection from DVDs that you do not own is illegal in most countries.
  2. Insert the DVD you wish to copy. Run MakeMKV. Select your DVD drive from the Source pulldown menu in MakeMKV.
  3. Select the content you want to copy. DVDs are often broken down into several “titles”. These titles include things like previews, menus, bonus features, and the actual movie. Uncheck the boxes for any content that you don’t wish to copy.
    • Titles less than 2 minutes will be automatically unselected. This will remove most previews from your finished rip.
  4. Select your output folder. This is where the finished file will appear after it is done being ripped.
  5. Rip the DVD. Once you have selected all of the settings that you want, click the Make MKV button. This will begin the ripping process. The time that it takes is dependent on the speed of your DVD drive. The average time to rip a DVD movie is about 15-30 minutes.[2]
  6. Play the video. MakeMKV creates an MKV file that contains all of the video and audio information. This file will be as large as the DVD was. MKV files do not work in iTunes or Windows Media Player, but can be played using the free VLC Player.
    • MKV files are lossless files. This means that the image and audio quality is retained from the original source.
  7. Convert the video file. If you want to add the video to your iTunes library, or play it on your iDevice, you will need to convert and compress it to MP4 format. You can do this using HandBrake, a free conversion program. Converting the video will also reduce the size, allowing you to store more videos on your hard drive. Converting will result in a loss of quality.
  8. Burn it to DVD. Once the file has been converted to MP4, you can burn it to a DVD to watch anywhere. There are programs available online that will allow you to burn the MKV file to DVD as well.

Burning a DVD Image

  1. Go back to Disk Utility. Again, this is located in your Applications folder.
  2. Press Command+Shift+U to unmount your image file.
  3. In the finder, locate the image you made of the DVD.
    • Drag the DVD image to the sidebar of disc utility. It should appear under a divider. Select it.
    • Select Images.
  4. Insert a blank, burnable DVD and select Burn. You can burn at maximum speed, but note that this occasionally creates glitches or hiccups in the burned disc; burn at the next highest speed if you want to play it safe.

Tips

  • The video on DVDs is in a special format called mpeg2, which is similar to mp3 for audio files. Mpeg2 makes video files small enough to fit on DVDs. They are actually even bigger than these very large DVD files.
  • DVDs have a number of copy prevention mechanisms. When you rip the DVD, you strip off those mechanisms but copy the rest of the video unadulterated. This means that the ripped DVD will take up as much space as the files on the DVD itself.

Warnings

  • Understand the copyright law in your current location. Don't break the law now just because it has become easy.

Related Articles

Sources and Citations

  1. ↑ http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2059
  2. ↑ http://www.makemkv.com/onlinehelp/
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