DVD backups

Can anyone recommend a good shareware or freeware program that can deal with copying my purchased dvd movies… seems that they are copy protected but I figure if I bought it I should be able to keep a backup incase my original gets damaged! Sorry for a dumb question but I am kinda new at this… thanks

 

AFAIK, this is legal for movies you legitimately own, but that doesn't stop the DVD manufacturers from trying to stop it.

Therefore, the first step is to 'decrypt' the DVD, and remove the protections. For this, I recommend using DVDFab Decrypter to get an unencoded, .ISO image file of the disc onto your hard drive.

Then, if the size of the source disc is larger than the destination disc, the image will need to be compressed. (Typically if burning to a single layer DVD)

For this, I use DVD Shrink. This has preset sizes to compress the image to, and also offers some re-authoring features, so you could for example, strip spanish subtitles to save space, giving more room for the movie itself. DVD Shrink also has decrypting features, but is no longer updated, and can't be guaranteed to work on newer discs.

Finally, once we have a workable image file, we need to burn it. Conventional methods don't work, as the .ISO file has to be translated into the actual disc contents. (Just burning the .ISO file will work, but won't be DVD playable). For this task, I recommend ImgBurn

All these apps are free, and should be enough to get you disc-to-file, and disc-to-disc backups.