You might know that all the DVDs that you buy in shops come with special copy protection. It's made to prevent their illegal distribution. But what to do if you simply want to copy a DVD movie for personal use – to upload it to a portable gadget, for example?

A protected disk can be copied, but it needs to be done correctly. Optical disks, despite the spread of other types of media, still remain relevant. First, they are much cheaper than USB-drives, and secondly, most of the films, audiobooks, and games for sale are recorded on DVDs.



Copyright owners do care about content protection and provide all sorts of ways that prevent free copying of a disc, but sometimes as we’ve already said above, a copy is a must-do. That’s where you need some knowledge and additional software.

Since the methods of protection against copying a disc are different, the methods for removing it also differ from each other. The simplest, but very effective way is to create a disk image, i.e., its exact copy.

Having received an image that is, in fact, an archive file, we can extract its content using a regular archiver program, like free 7-Zip, or simply by writing this image to another disk. You can use free software for this purpose. For example, CDBurnerXP. It’s a great utility that lets you create any type of CD or DVD.

It is worth knowing that it’s not necessary to burn the resulting image to a disk, but you can create a virtual drive and connect the ready image to it. There are many programs you can use to create virtual drives. One of the most popular is Virtual CloneDrive.

Of course, these methods don’t always work well, and then for copying one has to resort to more serious programs specially created for this purpose.

SlySoft CloneCD

This application is designed to solve one single problem, namely, "how to create a copy of a disk, including a protected one." The tool is easy to use. The only thing you need to do if you want to create a clone of a protected disk is to enable the special mode called "Raw Mode." However, despite the high software efficiency, the program can’t always bypass all protection algorithms, especially those that are used to prohibit copying from the game disks.

If SlySoft CloneCD turns out to be useless, it remains only to try to solve this problem with the help of another program.

Daemon Tools

This tool is a large set of utilities for performing a variety of actions associated with disks. Among this variety, we first of all will be interested in CloneCD. It is a special tool intended for cloning of protected optical disks. CloneCD can bypass various types of algorithms that oppose copying, including those used in PlayStation disks.

If we talk more specifically about the algorithms that are used for protecting modern disks, first of all, it should be mentioned Securom, SafeDisc (C-Dilla), Laserlock and StarForce.

Alcohol 120%

Alcohol 120% is one of the best programs for working with disks, including tasks related to copying. It supports more than 30 types of image formats and allows you to copy almost any disk, including the protected ones.

This software demonstrates high efficiency even when cloning game disks protected with the help of the StarForce algorithm.

Also worth noting is that the program allows you to create virtual drives and connect game disks images to these virtual drives. This feature significantly increases the speed compared to using a usual disk inserted in the physical drive.

As said above, sometimes you might need to convert a video and upload it from a DVD to a portable device – smartphone, tablet or laptop. That’s where you need one more software which does it for free – Freemake Video Converter.

This utility will help you convert your non-protected disk to a format supported by your device (MP4, AVI, 3GP, etc.). Let’s see how it works.

The 1st thing you should is to download software installation file on your PC or notebook. Please note that Freemake utility can be set up on Windows-based computers only. It doesn’t work with Linux or Mac OS.

If everything is OK, double-click the installation file and follow the installation procedure up to the end. The tool will start automatically when the installation completes.

In case your DVD is not protected, you can add it to Freemake right away by clicking the “+DVD” button. If it’s protected, then remove the protection before adding your movie to Freemake. By the way, you can also perform a contrary task and convert your media from PC to DVD. More about MP4 to DVD conversion is here.

As soon as your movie appears in the tool, choose a format that you want to convert it to. If you encode a movie for a gadget, you can choose your gadget manufacturer (Apple, Sony, Samsung, Nokia, etc.). Click the necessary button in Freemake Video Converter. There will appear a window with settings and quality choices.

If you clicked, for example, the “Apple” button, then click on the quality choice menu to see the available Apple devices and select the one you need. Alternatively, you can create a custom profile with the settings that you need (bitrate, codecs, fps).
Now set a folder for your converted videos and click “Convert” to convert your DVD movie to a selected format.

When the conversion finishes, open the folder and transfer new movies to your device.
As you can see, it's not difficult at all remove DVD protection and copy your movie to a PC and portable devices.