creating master for copy protect replication

[brenda]

We're creating a 2 hour DVD which we're going to have replicated at diskmasters.com. We wanted to have them make the replicated DVD copy-protected, but their website's instructions says we have to make the copy protection on the master which we submit them (or pay them to do our whole project over, which is cost prohibitive.) Their article on submitting a DVD master with copy protection says you can use DVD Studio Pro to create a master with CSS protection. But DVD Studio Pro is a high-end Mac product. Although I found some cheaper older versions of DVD Studio Pro, they seem to be only for Mac computers.

Does anyone know any way to create a copy protected master using software we might be able to afford for PC, or any other work-around? I see that diskmasters also accepts masters copy-protected using Macrovision instead of CSS, but I haven't been able to find out how to go about doing that either.

By the way, you guys at Muvipix have been a godsend. We couldn't have done this project without you!!!!!

Brenda

[Chuck Engels]

Thanks Brenda, good to hear that Muvipix was of help to your project

What is the purpose of copy protection? Currently there is no known copy protection that cannot be broken by one software package or another.
Basically, if someone wants to copy a DVD they can.

Encore DVD has a form of copy protection I believe, maybe Hunt will let us know how well that works.
But the copy protection that I have seen is all on the high end authoring packages, the the consumer level stuff.

I'm sure that someone here has looked into this before and will have some good advice for you.

[Steve Grisetti]

Glad to hear we've been helpful, Brenda.

However, this "copy protection" question comes up once in a while, and I don't think anyone has come up with a really good system for a decent price. (Of course, even the system the pros use can be easily busted.)

[Bill Hunt]

I am with Chuck and Steve on this one. Though every year, or two, some company claims to have just developed the "unbreakable" copy protection, other than white papers, none ever seems to see the light of day. All the rest are broken everyday. A simple Google search will likely reveal a dozen programs and the schemes that they break.

About the only scheme that seems to work right now is Sony's for Blu-ray. It is so prohibitively expensive that only a major studio could possibly afford it. Also, I'd wager that within 2009, there will be hacks to get by it, if they do not already exist in the warez community now.

I think that one is best off for DVD to have a © notice and be prepared to litigate. The honest clients will likely heed the notice, and the dishonest will just download a program to break the protection.

The biggest threat to pirated material is from the pressing plants in Asia. For the normal "blockbuster," copies are on the street in Asia, before the first shipments hit the US. The studios would be better off addressing that conduit, rather than trying other schemes, especially as some seem to hamper playability on many DVD players.

Sorry for the bad news.

Hunt

[brenda]

Hey Chuck & Steve!

I can't believe how quickly the uber gurus of Muvipix responded to my question - and on New Years Day to boot!

I know that anyone with geek skills can bust the copyright protection on DVDs, and I'm sure we'll still encounter a lot of that. We're just trying to make it more difficult to copy.

We're making a legal training video for lawyers, on a subject that will be really in demand to a certain audience. The cash-strapped nonprofit organization I volunteer for will be selling them for a source of income to keep the nonprofit afloat, and we don't want to spend all the time and money we've put into this project for the past year, just to have each purchaser make 10 bootleg copies and send them out to their friends, who, in turn will do the same. We already know this will happen because we published a book 10 years ago (which I wrote, pro bono) and it got bootlegged ad nauseum on law office copiers. Although it sold for only $35, and purchasers knew that the proceeds went to support a nonprofit organization, there were at least 3 or 4 times more bootleg copies in circulation (that we knew about) than we sold. We found out about it because so many people called the nonprofit to try to get copy of the same missing page, and people slipped and told us they liked the book so much they made copies for their friends.

We figure that most lawyers probably won't know how to bust the copyright protection on a DVD, and it won't be as easy as telling their secretary to xerox a copy of a book. They'll have to ask their teenage kids to bust our copyright protection, which may give them a little twinge of ethics.

Brenda

[Chuck Engels]

Here is a topic from Creative Cow that says Encore DVD can do what the duplication company is looking for, but it won't actually copy protect the DVD.
To do this you would need to spend about $600 or so on Premiere Pro and then author the DVD with Encore, might be worth it for you.

Other than that there really isn't much in the consumer market for DVD copy protection.
I found a few things for CD copy protection, but not for DVDs. Hollywood pays big bucks for that stuff and it doesn't totally protect them anyway.

[Chuck Engels]

Here is a tutorial on how to add the copy protection for the dupication facility using Encore DVD 2.0
http://www.adobe.com/designcenter/encor ... ncode.html
You might be able to find a copy on eBay or somewhere at a discount.

[Chuck Engels]

And this says it all
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD_copying_software

[brenda]

I bought a copy of Encore 2.0 (on Amazon for cheap!), and it's on its way to me. I talked to my new account rep at Discmakers.com today and he said the only way they will accept a master with CSS is on a DLT (Digital Linear Tape). So now I'm shopping around for a DLT drive. Any suggestions? Anyone have one they want to sell?

My computer is running Windows Vista. I don't have a SCSI card (I thought that went out of style years ago!) and lots of the DLT drives I've seen on EBay and general hardware sites I found through google are SCSI's. I had a SCSI computer once about 10 years ago, so I know how to add the card and the terminators - if necessary, but it seems like there should be a more modern, smaller and cheaper solution. I only need the tape to hold a few gigabytes. I won't be doing this all that often - just whenever I need to send it to the replicator, so I can get a rewriteable tape and reuse it.

Any thoughts are greatly appreciated. I'll continue to share my research on this topic for those who need to do DVD authoring.

By the way, the link to lynda.com had some great tutorials on Encore DVD authoring, and now I understand why I needed Encore. It's the missing link between Premiere Elements and the DVD replicator for what I'm trying to do. Plus, we can do lots of other interactive things with the DVD that seemed impossible just yesterday. I'm glad I found out about it before we tried making the menus using PE. There are so many more menu options in Encore. Since a lot of our customers will be watching our DVD on their computers and going straight to the menu item they need to view, there are many new interactive things we can put on the DVD using Encore.

Thanks for the tips!

Brenda

[Bobby]

I took a quick look around, and it looks like all DLT drives seem to be SCSI, whether internal or external. And big bucks - even the tapes cartridges are expensive!

Putting in a SCSI card isn't too much of a problem, as long as you know what type of card slots are available in your PC. And SCSI cabling can vary, so I would try to get the package together - card, cable, DLT drive so that all matches. Not all SCSI cables are the same.

I am wondering if there is a service somewhere (or you know someone) who can transfer data from a DVD to a DLT tape for you on a one-off basis, rather than spend the money and time to ramp up to DLT in your PC. DLT is a common backup medium for server PCs, so if you know a local business that has a server with a DLT drive you might be able to do the transfer there.

It is unfortunate that Discmakers is so inflexible.

[brenda]

Update on my quest for a solution to the DLT obstacle:

After spending a very frustrating day on the phone talking to people at replication houses, most of whom wanted to charge us $500 to "author" our project - on top of the replication fees, I finally found a workaround - and a very friendly company with superior quality and competitive prices.

Pacific Disk, located in Los Angeles and several other places, (http://www.pacificdisc.com) told me that yes, they did accept projects authored by Adobe Encore from a Premiere Elements project, and that I did not have to invest in a hugely expensive DLT drive. All I have to do is put my entire completed Encore project on a Firewire 400 drive (about $110 on Amazon) and send it to them. They will plug the drive into their system and copy it on their high end DLT drive to make their own DLT master to burn the glass replication master from. The guy there couldn't have been nicer. He told me that DLT drives have been around for 20 years as tape backup systems for computer networks, and becoming obsolete. The reason they're still being used to make the glass masters for replicating DVDs is that they run very precisely at a very high speed, which is necessary to create a glass master.

Much of the frustration I encountered today was the result of the replicators trying to sell me their authoring services for an additional fee. Several of them told me that there is no way to export a master using Adobe Encore with CSS without having a DLT drive.

Incidentally, I did find some DLT drives that run on USB 2.0 (Quantum DLT-V4), but the guy at one replication house told me that you can't use those low end DLT drives to make a master. I was starting to doubt his advice before ending the conversation, so I don't know if that's correct or not. It doesn't matter because even the lowest end DLT drive costs around $750-$1200. The $500 authoring fee was already beyond our budget. Since we're hoping to make a series of these DVDs, we needed an inexpensive long term solution.

If the firewire drive workaround works, then that's all we'll ever have to do. It turns out that Pacific Disk offers 5-color off-set printing on the disk, whereas Discmaker only offered 3-color silk screen. With the much nicer rigid plastic case (like those from a video store), the entire run will be cheaper at Pacific Disk than at Diskmakers, and the Pacific Disk quote includes higher quality on-disk printing. And Pacific Disk gets five stars for friendly customer service.

I'll give you an update in a few weeks when we get our DVDs back.

Brenda

[Bob]

That's great Brenda! I hope it works out.

[Chuck Engels]

I would sure like to know how this all turns out Brenda, please keep us informed

[Bill Hunt]

Brenda,

Sounds like the ducks are starting to line up for you. In the meantime, you might find this thread of interest:
http://www.adobeforums.com/webx?14@@.59b7692b/0

Neil Wilkes is the MOD of the Encore forum, but is also a commercial DVD-Video & Audio producer in the UK, i.e. he does this for a living. His advice is always 100%. While this particular article is rather short, Neil has contributed to many more in the Encore forum. If you ever need to check out what a replication house tells you, he is the person to ask.

Good luck,

Hunt

[brenda]

Help! I've been foiled by Adobe's nonsupport of their own products!

The last you heard from me on this thread, my ducks were lining up in a row as you said. I purchased a previously owned but not used version of Encore DVD 2.0 on EBay, and finally after weeks of effort and phone calls to customer support in India, last night the product registration was successfully transferred to me. The previous owner had never registered it.

Meanwhile, I was not able to install the program on my computer using the serial number. The installation process would work up to about 99% installed, then there would be a message "backing out of installation" followed by an error message saying Install Shield has encountered an unexpected error and aborted the installation. But I was able to install the 30 day trial version which is on the DVD, and have successfully used it to partially complete my DVD authoring project. Last night the people in India told me to call tech support today, which I did. After spending the morning mostly on hold or talking to people who didn't know the solution, I was told that Adobe does not support Encore DVD 2.0, to which I replied that the website said the support is limited to installation issues, which this is. Then she claimed Encore 2.0 does not work on Vista. However, the test version on the same DVD does work on Vista. I also checked the Adobe website to make sure that this is not some kind of test version that doesn't work unless you buy it online, and I can tell from the packaging (including a manual which was still shrink-wrapped and 2 tutorial DVDs) that this is the full version of the software.

I believe the problem may be some kind of encryption on the DVD, which doesn't want to let me load it onto my computer because the guy I bought it from may have loaded it on his computer before deciding this wasn't the product he thought it was. I was wondering if the programs you guys told me about earlier in this thread that bust CSS encryption can be used to get around this installation problem.

I might be able to finish this project using the test version, but it's going to expire in a couple of weeks and I won't be able to use it again.

Any thoughts?

Brenda