Intervideo DVD Copy 2 Platinum review

Verdict:

Review Date: 22 Sep 2004

Price when reviewed: inc VAT

Reviewed By: Ben Pitt

Our Rating 2 stars out of 5

Review
Specs

While making copies of commercial discs is illegal, it appears that British law permits DVD-copying software that doesn't attempt to defeat CSS encryption but does work alongside DeCSS utilities freely available on the internet.

InterVideo's DVD Copy 2 Platinum is fairly open about this and its online help says: "DVD Copy 2 supports to copy DVD content that's been ripped by any free DeCSS software. Ripping your DVD-Video and saving it in your hard drive, DVD Copy 2 helps you to burn it into DVD, VCD or SVCD."

Sure enough, by doing this we could create copies of CSS-encrypted DVDs, with the software over-compressing the MPEG2 video to allow 8.5GB dual-layer DVDs to fit on a 4.7GB single-layer blank disc. The process took half an hour on our Athlon 64 3000+ test PC. You can delete extra features of the original disc to maintain the highest possible quality for the movie, but this can mess up the menu structure, rendering some discs unplayable. M-DVD allows multiple DVDs to be combined on a single disc, which isn't much use in practice. You can also turn DVDs into Video CDs, MPEG4 or WMV files.

This version includes support for dual-layer DVD writers, allowing dual-layer discs to be copied with no loss of quality or content, but the current cost of dual-layer media means copies will cost almost as much as the originals.

Only eagle-eyed film buffs will notice the quality lost by recompressing to single-layer media. But Nero 6 Power Pack, while it can't write to dual-layer discs, offers better recompression options and a wealth of other disc-burning utilities for just £39.

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