Burning Movies that you own, rent, or borrow!

You want to make a copy of a DVD. It is legal to make an archival backup of a DVD you own, but you can also do this for rented, borrowed, or even from NetFlix

Step 1. Purchase your DVD Burner. I have a TDK 8X DVD+R DVD-R multiformat burner. I would go with +R versus the older -R standard when burning movies because it will be more compatable with DVD players you already own and watch movies on

Step 2. Burn the DVD using a program called DVD X Copy, now Illegal but available underground It is very easy to use and works great. Here are some tips. Original movies are burned on double layer disks which can hold 4.7GB*2 on one disk. It does this by refocusing the laser from the first reflective layer to the second semireflective layer on the disk. (This is why you will sometimes see the movie pause half way through as it is refocusing on the second layer of the disk) Blank DVD's only have one layer, so the movie must be compressed to fit on one disk. To make sure the movie looks the best is to tweaking it yourself when burning the movie originally. Find the video file that has the most chapters and this will be the actual movie, while the others with one or a few chapters are just previews and bonus features. Slide the scale on the movie file to compress it the least and the other files will compress more. This way the movie is compressed a little, while the bonus features and compressed a lot!

Step 3. Burning a copy of a copy
DVD X Copy is meant for archival backups of disks you already own. But what if you want to make a copy of a copy? For this you need to use another program called DVD Decrypter available FREE at: http://www.dvddecrypter.com/ This program will allow you to make an exact copy of the DVD movie to another disk. Why not just use this program in the first place? Becuase it does not decrypt and compress a retail movie like the previous program does, it just makes an exact copy of the backup. This requires two steps.
Step 1. Creat the ISO from the disk. In DVD Decrypter, select Mode -> ISO -> Read. Then under the "Destination" section, click on the folder icon, and name the file you want to create. Note: You will need up to 4.7GB free on your hard drive to copy the data so make sure you have enough room!
Step 2. Burn the DVD from the ISO. In DVD Decrypter, select Mode -> ISO -> Write. Burn away!

FarCry!

This game rocks! FarCry has amazing tropical scenary with amazing graphics assuming you have a 2GHz plus computer with an ATI Radeon 9800 or other graphics card with 128MB of ram. It's pretty tough, so I would first play in easy mode. And it is going to be optimized for AMD 64 Bit computing soon which will make it look even better. The best looking game made to date! (Until Doom 3 and Half Life 2 come out later this year)