I have now found (and heard of) several DVDs that are immune to DVD Decrypter. A girl I work with has a boyfriend that is obsessed with movies; he occasionally lets me borrow borrowed movies from Blockbuster. He is strictly interested in current American movies, so he is my source of knowledge in that area, as I focus on foreign movies. He recently brought me Shoot 'em Up, which blew me away. I tried copying it to my hard drive, so I could watch it again if I desired. DVD Decrypter failed. Not in the ripping process, but in the reading process. I then decided to try and open the DVD itself and pull out the .vob files. Instead of opening the contents in a folder, the movie started playing with software embedded on the DVD. I closed the player and finally got the DVD folder to open. I opened up VobEdit, so I could see which .vob files contained the wasteful previews (which were numerous). VobEdit would not play the .vob files. Even worse, Windows would not allow me to drag the .vob files out the folder. At this point, I noticed something interesting. The size of the DVD was 11 gigabytes. Dual layer DVDs are rated at 8.5 gigabytes, so this is a unique DVD (as far as I know).

I decided to make my life much easier and simply ordered Shoot 'em Up from Amazon, in the marketplace. It could take me longer than 5 movie viewings to figure out how to get this on my hard drive. I do know it can be done, since another friend (that strictly downloads movies) managed to find it in .avi form. So someone out there figured out how to rip it.

I think the simplest, best, and most reasonable thing to do is not pirate movies. Most DVDs are fairly cheap anyway. Not that I'm a fan of the movie nor music industry for that matter, but I do have respect for many of the artists, and feel that pirating is wrong. Just my personal take.

cheers,

-avatar!

Don't bother ripping DVD's at all, compared to ripping CD's I think it's more trouble than it's worth with all the copy protection crap. Then again, I really don't buy many DVD's anyway unlike my one friend and aunt.

That being said, I really don't look forward to see how much copy protection they use to lock down the data on the medium that is to succeed the Compact Disc because I do like to have my music on my computer.

Hollywood's master plan to combat piracy involves releasing crappier movies every year...