Here is a quote from their FAQ:

Translation: Anybody can copy the DVD by using the readily available DVDFab software in its "pathplayer" mode. In that mode the software reads the disc the same way a DVD player does, completely bypassing the "Patronus" (what a name, did they rip it off Harry Potter?) and copying only the video to a new disc. The new disc can then be copied without any special software. And of course it will play everything that is on the original disc.

You'd think they'd at least come up with something original. In reality, Disney has been using the same type of copy protection on all of their DVDs for years. And they have been ripped successfully by DVDFab for just as many years. And the same type of protection was used back in the days of 5.25" diskettes! And soon the program CopyIIPC was able to bypass that protection. In the 1980s!

Save your money! If someone wants to rip your DVD, he will. No amount of copy protection will stop them. Most people do not know how to do it. But those people do not know how to defeat the standard CSS protection either. So, use the standard protection and do not worry about hackers. After all, chances are they would not buy your DVD anyway, so it makes no difference to you financially.

Thanks Taky, I tried this and it works. My sales for an annual event doubled over last year.

I have one possible reservation. By making the small "cut" in the black video on the surface of the DVD, I wonder if , over months or years, that cut could "expose the sublayers" and then that exposure could spread into the program and ruin the disc for playback. Possibly causing oxidation or something like that ???

I wouldn't think so. The polycarbonate disc wouldn't go through too much flexing in its lifetime, and with DVD writeable discs, the data layer is literally on top of the opposite side of the disc platter.

Andrew

Hi from Pushpa
 

Hi Andrew

Ur name sounds very familiar to me...R u working for OPTUS in Brisbane??

Thx
Pushpa de Silva

Nope, that's not me. Plenty of other Andrew Smiths around ... lotsa fun when it comes to voting at election time. :-)

Andrew

U r right...Thanks Andrew...

Why do you think your sales doubled? Was it because you notified people that the disks were copy protected, or was it because people bought a disk, went home to try and copy it, realized they can't and came back to buy more?

I'm just wondering because if it was the "copy protection notification" method, you could just say that without actually defacing your disks.

Thanks Andrew, I hoped someone , like yourself, with a bit of knowledge about the makeup of a DVD disc would put my mind at ease.....

Chris, In the past, like now, orders are placed and prepaid for "X" number of DVDs. That has normally been the end of it. This year, however, the normal number of orders were placed and then about a week later, we got more orders. Almost as many as the original number. Then, a few days later there were orders for even more....

Interesting thought about the using the note and not doing anything to the disc.

I DID place a small note on the DVD cover and on each disc stating that the disc was "protected" with copy-guard. My conclusion(s) might be way off, but that's all I know to attribute to the number of extra orders.

The scratch method...
 

Taky / Tom,

I really want to try this for an annual dance recital that I do for which the sales are way off this year. Many of the parents are friends and I have reason to suspect that there may be some copying going on.

I added 10 minutes of black video to the end of the show in Premiere and authored the disc in Encore with the final chapter having the 10 minutes of black after the credits. After burning, I can clearly see the band on the disc. I took a razor and made several cut marks using a magnifier to make sure I am in the band area only.
Tried the "copy disc" function in Cyberlink Power2go and the "copy to disc image" in Infrarecorder. Both made flawless copies with no errors. I keep going back to the disc and beating it up more until now it has about 15 deep nicks and a 2 inch strip that has been scraped totally opaque and still no errors. I thought it might be the blu-ray drive I am using to read the disc so I tried on a different machine with a regular dvd drive using Nero and still no errors.
Is there something I am not doing correctly?

Thanks,
Mat

DVD are written and read from center (with some exception for dual layer)
So , if you got a DVD that is not full, you can see where data stops, because the dye is not the same color when burned.
Looks like you are scratching the empty zone of the DVD, hence no effect.
you have to know too, that DVD are not hard disk, so , there is no track , sector.
the laser is witing a "cloud" of bits, with some of them redundant. If you scratch a disk, there are chance that the internal error correction system can compensate for it (if relevant like video-DVD).
The main difference between reading a video on a DVD and copying it as data is when wathing video, you do not really care to loose some pixels, or even a full GOP, you just want the show to go on.
When copying data, you want a digital copy, meaning a bit for bit image.
That is why where a DVD player could forget about some scratch, a computer reading the same disk could give up displaying some error message about CRC (cyclic redundancy check) or read error.

The worst thing that can happen with scratched disk protection is that some customer could return it saying it is a defective disk (and he would be right), since DVD are not supposed to be sold with scratches. Or specifically put a disclaimer about that.

Hi Mat,

I found that it only took one very small cut to do the job. 1/8th of an inch, at the most, placed at the outer edge of the black video was enough. It did not take multiple cuts to do the job. Make the small cut "across" the disc, not around the disc. I then tried to copy using DVD Shrink and Nero neither program would finish the process. The copy process went fine until the last couple of minutes and then the error message came up and stated that there was an error and the program could not copy the disc: NO COPY. Stay with it all the way through the copy process.

I then played the DVD back on 5 different brands of DVD players and the marked disc played fine.

Thanks for the replies. I guess I was meaning could I have done something wrong in the authoring that is making this disc impervious to the error.
The show itself is 02:08:00 before I put the extra 10 minutes of black footage at the end. My original burned disc before adding the black, of course, had no visible band and since I am over the 2 hour mark there is no unused area of the disc. Could there be some issue with the bitrate or transcoding?
I really am at a loss. I have totally damaged the surface of the disc over the band with the black video and I can't get any of the ripping programs to error...
Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Mat

But that is not software pirates use. Did it stop DVD Decrypter and DVDFab?

If it was possible to copy protect DVD's movie studios would be in seven heaven. Programs like DVDFab will copy anything. DVD/Blu-ray protection is not possible, all the protection methods has already been cracked and anyone can do it. It's a lost cause.

Can Tom or anyone else shoot and upload some video showing how they do their marking of the disc? This might be better than just a descriptive posting.

Andrew

You're waisting your valuable time
 

I saved all sorts of DVDs my kids scratched. If one of the programs fail, another one will work - because they use slightly different techniques. DVDFab for example will copy everything and "finalize" the copy to the point it was able to copy.

Get this: I copied one my three year old stepped on - had a half inch CRACK in it!!!

Just write it off and move on! If Hollywood can't do it, you don't have the resources to do it, for sure.

You can play DVD that has scratches all over because DVD play back will ignore some of the errors. But for bit by bit copy, that's a different story.

Adam,
You are 100% correct, but as several forum members mentioned in this thread earlier, I know that many, with the right programs, can copy my DVDs when I am using Taky's method. I'm not concerned about the geeks and pirates. I'm just concerened about the casual everyday users who have Nero and Shrink and the other rather simple burn programs. Since I only have Nero and Shrink, those are the only ones I could test......

I agree that the casual users do not know about those tools.

Did some experimenting last night. Shooting for an error, i scratched a bit beyond the band with the black video and all three of my programs errored. So I know for some reason, the ripping programs are ignoring scratches in the area with black video. I still keep thinking it may have something to do with how premere and encore encode the black video... Could this be this possible? I output my final project from premiere as an AVI and let encore transcode it. (It says it ended up as 8.2Mbps)
Tonight I think I will try putting an audio track at the end of the 10 minutes of black just so there is some data there...

DVD Shrink is by now very old, it has not been developed for at least 4-5 years - and it still cracks a reported 90+% precent of all the latest and greatest fancy encryptions.

The other two, Decrypter and Fab are actively developed, so they are even better. Decrypter for example has a function where you can set it go over and over a problem area until it figures it out.

Fab is and it can apparently handle even BD. But Decrypter is no longer being developed ever since the author was contacted by is it Macrovision? One of those. The author stopped developing it and has released ImgBurn instead, which does not rip protected discs and is actually a very useful piece of software for us filmmakers.