RealDVD Lets You Take Your DVDs With You
Hollywood Newsroom is now Buzz Newsroom! Visit and bookmark our new site. Buzz is bigger and better, including sports, world news, gadgets and the entertainment news that you're used to. Same staff, just more stuff! Why Fark, Drudge and Huffington when you can Buzz!?The advantages to digitizing your DVD collection are clear: Once you’ve loaded your discs to a hard drive, you’ll no longer have to fumble around with easily scratched discs. And it’s far more convenient to put a bunch of movies on a laptop so you can have your entertainment library with you at all times. With the announcement of a new software program, RealDVD, Real Networks is providing the first mainstream means of legally transferring DVDs to a hard drive–with extras. The new $40 software is the first application to enable individuals to save DVDs on a PC hard drive without breaking copyright laws.
This isn’t to say “ripping” DVDs hasn’t been happening for years now: Plenty of software utilities that strip away a DVD’s copy-protection scheme have made the rounds. But stripping away the copy-protection violates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and has caused issues in the past.
RealDVD gets around this by actually preserving the copy-protection on a disc and copying a DVD’s contents exactly as they are structured on the DVD itself to the hard drive. For the time being, RealDVD supports only regular DVDs–there is no Blu-ray support–and each DVD uses about 5- to 9GB of disk space (the space varies, depending upon the disc’s contents), so you will need a fairly large hard drive to save more than a handful of DVDs.
- from PCworld