Posted: 4/7/2006 2:04:21 PM EDT
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Okay, computer gurus, another question. I have a 3 y/o dell 2.0ghz w/ 1 gb Ram. I currently have no DVD burners, just one CD-ROM and one CD-Burner. Can I buy 2 DVD Burners from a place like tigerdirect.com and put them in place of my existing drives. I want to copy DVDs. I also want to occasionally watch DVDs on the computer. Or do I need special video cards and such? Guidance appreicated! |
Yes you can. You can put the source DVD in one and the target DVD in the other. But both drives need not be burners, once can simply be a DVD drive. In fact you can do it with a single DVD R drive. Your are gonna want a copy of DVD Shrink 3.2 and Nero. Most burners will come with a copy of Nero. I've had the best luck with HP DVD burners by the way. Might also want to consider getting a dual layer and DL DVDs are now getting more affordable. |
Uhh, hope those dvds don't have css encryption on it, cause that aint happining. There is no way you can decrypt the CSS encryption 'on the fly'. |
I do it with Shrink 3.2 all the time. It reads from the source DVD, decrypts and copies to the computer drive, then burns to the target DVD drive. |
Good call on that. Most people forget about that. Probably should get a Dual Layer DVD Burner as well. To play movies on your PC, you should have a somewhat decent card to view them. |
Okay now, I'm not sure what you mean. I have looked into it further and found one DVD Burner and one DVD player. Together, only $65! Woohoo! So which do I set up as the master and which the slave? I thought I would simply put them in place of the two drives I already have in the computer. As far as I know, each has it's own letter definition (?). I thought the master/slave thing was only if you were trying to cram 2 devices (drives) into one port (?). Again, I might not have a clue what I'm talking about here. If I'm way off base, someone please explain. |
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I don't know the technical aspects of the installation. The instructions with the drives should show a picture of the pins on the back of the drive. As far as I know, it doesn't matter which drive you designate as master and slave. It just involves moving the jumper over to a different set of pins. On my first drive install, I didn't know anything about that so I just popped the new drive in and couldn't even boot up. Took some long distance tech support from a forum friend to figure out what I did wrong. As for manufacturer suggestions, the Lite On I installed a few months ago seems to be quite good. I think I paid around $75 for it. |
Jumper pins on back. You actually are probably better off with the "cable select" option. It will be covered in the installation and sounds harder than it is. |
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Buy 1 DVD DL burner. You can not shrink and DeCSS on the fly. Won't happen! Maybe when we have 6GHz Dual Core CPU's and 1600MHz FSB speeds you might be able to burn on the fly at 2x. As is now a DVD is Processed to the harddrive and finally written to the burner. The IDE cable for the burner needs to be an 80 conductor to allow full speed usage. Most burning software will set the device to UDMA for you. DO NOT PUT A BURNER ON THE SAME CABLE AS A ZIP DRIVE. I could go on, but I might start having nightmares from my time working warranty techsupport for a major computer corporation. ( I now reverted to my true trade as a machinist, as my computer job was outsourced to a foreign country. . . ) |
go on google and search for (for instance) WMV codecs. I found a pack of codecs that'll play anything so far. But I can't remember the name. Most should have an .avi a divX and a mpg(2, 3, 4) codec. |
likewise just one burner here  Pioneer DVR-A09XL comes with ULEAD software (play, burn, backup, etc - Dual Layer and everything) |
You didn't get a very good deal. The fact that it didn't come with shit like Nero means you are gonna have to pay for them and that won't be cheap. |
Yes, that is how most people do it. What a previous poster has said and I think some others misunderstood it, one can not decrypt CSS encryption on the fly (i.e. going from one drive to another directly) DVD Shrink has to put the image on the hard drive first to decrypt it, and then Nero copies it from the hard drive to the DVD burner of your choice. So when you are coping a movie using DVD shrink, it will put an image on the hard drive anyways, so one drive is all that is necessary. |
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DVD Shrink This is a working link for DVD Shrink. If/when you get Nero it integrates with it very well. |
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I just got this drive, and it is awesome. It's pretty pricey, but it can burn DL discs at 10x speed, and it comes with excellent software.... Return the drive you got and get one that comes with software, it would be worth it. www.newegg.com/product/product.asp?item=N82E16827249003 |