Pricy, underpowered package with an attitude
Written: Dec 31 '03 (Updated Apr 05 '04)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: allows you to copy commercial or homemade DVDs onto DVD-ROM
Cons: Does not allow authoring of DVDs, annoying copyright blurbs on screen. It's currently illegal.
The Bottom Line: There are better ways to make nag-free copies of DVDs. Head over to about.com's desktop video site for tons of information about how to proceed.
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| Godai-kun's Full Review: 321studios DVD X Copy Gold Full Version for PC |
UPDATE: Studio123, the makers of this software package, have been served with an injunction against distributing DVD-X-COPY, which has been ruled illegal because of its CSS decryption capability. The company is continuing to fight, but at the moment (Early April, 2004) they are reduced to selling a product without the decryption capability (which makes the package completely worthless for anything except creating and burning your own non-commercial DVDs).
If you want this package (and Lord only knows why you would), better hit the stores and snap up a copy before they all disappear. I suspect they won't be out there much longer.
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321 Studios' "DVD X COPY" line of software has received an immense amount of positive lip service in the consumer electronics and computer press. I completely fail to see why, since the package is quite pricy, of very limited capability, and the company's holier than thou attitude permeates every bit of this product.
For your $99 retail (but look for frequent rebate opportunities - I got my copy for $20 after rebate) you get a copy of DVD X COPY EXPRESS (available for $49 list as a separate package) as well as a copy of DVD X COPY GOLD. The differences between the two are a lot less than you might expect. The EXPRESS version will examine your DVD and determine whether or not the entire contents of the DVD can fit on a single DVD-R or DVD-RW. In most cases the answer will be "no" (since the only available commercial writable discs are single-layered discs with half the space of their commercial bretheren). In which case the EXPRESS version will allow you to select a single audio track and a single subtitle track, and will then produce a playable DVD containing a (sometimes heavily compressed) version of the main feature with the audio and subtitle options you selected. If the whole source disc WILL fit on a single DVD-R, it will copy it over for you.
The GOLD version isn't much more powerful. It does give you a certain amount of additional flexibility. It will split discs across two DVD-R blanks, and allow you to determine what features will go on each disc (although for the most part, you would be better off sticking with their defaults). It will allow you to individually remove special features from the copied disc, and to select audio and subtitle tracks individually for inclusion or exclusion.
And that's about it. Have video that you want to author as a DVD? Look elsewhere, because DVD X COPY is not an authoring package. It also won't burn discs from images, and won't allow you to add anything to your final discs that wasn't present on the original. It's a disc copier, plain and simple. Nothing more.
Well, actually, it is one other thing - a nanny. You see, every time you place a DVD in the drive to be copied, you have to check through an inane little popup that asks you whether the disc in this drive is borrowed or rented. If you answer yes, the program aborts. As if anybody were at all likely to answer that question truthfully if they were setting out to make illegal copies of discs they got from the local blockbuster!
And that's not all, because every disc that this software produces inserts its own 45-second splash screen reminding you that this is an archival copy and not to be sold, given away, made available for public distribution, etc. Thanks guys. If I want an angel on my shoulder, I'll call my girlfriend. And just in case you didn't get the message from the above, they actually write a file on each disc which contains the unique registration number for your copy of the software. Just in case 10,000 copies of "Star Wars: The Phantom Money Sink" pop up on ebay and they want to know who to sue.
How does it work? Well, putting aside the needless holier-than-thou attitude, it will either work very well or not at all. That's because support from 321 is pathetic, self-contradictory, and largely limited to a hugely understaffed set of bulletin boards where you will hear all about everybody else's problems long before finding a solution to your own. This software abjectly refused to run on the first machine I installed it on. After many emails, calls, and posts to various people who professed to know how to solve my problem, I uninstalled it and installed on another machine, where it has been working flawlessly. Both machines were identically equipped. Go figure.
If you can get it for a low price, and don't mind the constant appeals to your morality, this product will copy DVDs. It does nothing that you can't get other software to do, though, and in some cases for nothing.
Recommended:
No
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Epinions.com ID:
Godai-kun
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Member: Kevin Barth
Location: Silver Spring, Maryland
Reviews written: 248
Trusted by: 55 members
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