Making a back-up copy of a DVD under MacOS X

Absolutely the easiest and best way to make your legal backup copy of your DVD is as follows:

  1. Use DVD Backup or OSEx to get the unencrypted and macrovision-removed content onto hard disk.

  2. Use commercial product DVD2One at http://www.dvd2one.com. It costs about $50, and works fine. The docs fail to mention the crucial point that you must create an empty directory called "AUDIO_TS" as a sibling to the compressed "VIDEO_TS" that dvd2one creates. If you don't do this, the VCD-encoded files will not have any sound!

  3. Use commercial product Roxio Toast to burn the DVD. Do not burn as "data"! The docs fail to mention the crucial point that you must choose the Toast button "Other" and press on it to get the drop-down list. That lets you choose "dvd" or "vcd" among other items. Dvd will have better quality of course.
To burn a VCD

You would burn a VCD if you only want to spend 50 cents on a platter, not $3 on a DVD-R. Here's how you do it (caution: not yet tried by me, corrections and updates welcome).

  1. Use the freeware ffmpeg, which can be downloaded from http://homepage.mac.com/major4/ or http://ffmpeg.sf.net/.

  2. In ffmpeg, encode to mpeg1 or mpeg2 and create .bin/.cue files for burning with Toast.

  3. Use Roxio Toast, and choose "Other" -> "VCD". Drop the .bin files into the Toast window.

Other Info

There's a tutorial on DVD burning on OS-X at http://www.prism.gatech.edu/~gtg722g/dvdriptutorial/

It is well-intentioned, but sometimes a bit disorganized and hard to follow. It's not just you.