In your experiences, do most DVDs that you either rent or buy have an encryption feature that makes them impossible to copy? I'm not having alot of luck downloading movies, ie poor quality or something horribly different from the title.

The only dvd's I have difficulty with backing up tend to be the occasional xtras disk. Don't know why that should be.

Dwnlding movies is a large topic. There's been many threads about it. Every week in fact.

A decent movie should be 500 MB or more in size. Most have been reduced in size to fit onto a cd. Else they've been broken into a few parts to fit onto a dvd5 format disk. BUT, there's many cheap utilities out there to do the job plus many people who don't have a clue how to do it at t reasonable quality. So with both those factors at hand, yes there's going to be some that are not as good as what they should be. Some people are just too impatient to put the time into learning how to do properly or the time it takes so just do it at min quality for a fast effort. Again, look for the larger ones. mpeg/mpg/avi/avi-divx/avi-3ivx are the best to aim for. Not too many decent wmv files out there. Not full movies anyway.

Thanks for the reply. The very first one that I tried to back up was a Edit movie of my daughters that she got for Christmas. Since the children got the portable DVD players from Santa....I could just see these DVDs getting scratched, etc. This one gave me an error message that said that it was copy protected. I was just wondering if I would get that on most of them....which would help determine the usability of a copy program. Thanks for the info.

Is there a copy program that anyone can recommend??

Thanks for the info. I have Roxio and it works wonderfully for any copying of cds. I've had great results with music files, downloading, burning and copying. Now, I'm trying to "run with the big dogs" and do movies. EMule was recommended for downloading movies and I found lots of files, just takes quite a while to get them downloaded (even with cable internet) and I haven't found a way to preview the file, even with a good percentage downloaded. I am having to rely on the comments on the file.

The particular one that I am downloading now, is avi. I understand (through another thread that I started) that it is possible, using particular software, to convert the file and burn it using a cd and cd burner. At this point, I am just trying to download a full length movie...and view it, making sure that it is decent quality and not something weird unrelated to the movie title. The loss of quality using the cd route is basically irrelevant as they will be used on the children's 7 inch portable DVD players, not our large television where the lesser quality would be noticable.