RealDVD copies, stores movie DVDs onto your hard drive

The new program rips your DVD movies, including all the menus, special features, and audio tracks, and stores them on a hard drive for later viewing—and according to RealNetworks, at least, it's all legal.

When the reps from RealNetworks first described RealDVD ($29, 30-day free trial, available later this month) to me, I shrugged my shoulders—after all, there are plenty of free, albeit less-than-legit, apps available that'll rip a Macrovision-protected DVD onto a hard drive.

What makes RealDVD stand apart from freebies like Handbrake, however, is that RealDVD copies the entire DVD to your hard drive—and I mean all of it, including all the DVD menus, every last audio track, all the special features, the FBI warnings, and even the CSS copy protection. Indeed, the RealDVD copy is an exact copy, with no visible degradation in video quality. (Most other DVD rippers, Handbrake included, only rip a single title at a time.)

I've been testing RealDVD (Windows-only, for now) for about a week now, and it's pretty simply to use. Once installed, you simply fire it up and insert a DVD. The program reads the disc, then grabs cover art and program info from the online Gracenote database. You then get three options: You can simply play the movie, you can save it to your hard drive, or you can watch and save at the same time.

Copying a DVD takes anywhere from 10-30 minutes, depending on the speed of your system's DVD drive; it took about 30 minutes to copy a two-hour movie using the X8 DVD burner on my laptop. Also, if you're interrupted while copying a movie, you can always pick up where you left off.

Nice, but there's a catch—because RealDVD makes an exact copy of a DVD, the file sizes are massive. For example, the mutant zombie-fest Resident Evil—which clocks in at about 100 minutes—took up a whopping 6.65GB of disc space on my system, about the same size as an HD-quality movie download. RealDVD supports detachable drives, but still, that's a pretty hefty file.

Once you've ripped a few discs (depending on how much free space you have available, of course—the smallish Vista partition on my MacBook Pro only had room for one), you can view your collection by clicking My DVDs; you'll get a nicely laid-out grid complete with cover images and movie details.

Playback of DVD copies on my Boot Camp-running, 2.40GHz Core Duo MacBook Pro was impressive—video quality looked indistinguishable compared to the source DVD, and all the menus and features survived intact. I noticed the odd skipped frame, but nothing more than I've seen when playing a DVD in the optical drive.

Alright then, so … what do the movie studios think about this? Won't they go ape once they find out about RealDVD? Well, the RealNetwork reps I spoke to said that the company is "in talks" with the studios—and besides, they said, since RealDVD does its copying without cracking the CSS encryption on a DVD, the program doesn't run afoul of DMCA copyright laws.

Well, maybe so, but I have a hard time believing the big studios and the DVD-CCA will let this go without making a fuss (witness the ongoing litigation surrounding Kaliedescape's DVD jukebox). Guess we'll find out soon enough.

In any case, RealNetworks has built some viewing limitations into the player (probably hoping to appease the studios); namely, you can only watch your ripped movies on a total of five PCs. Also worth noting—each additional system requires its own copy of RealDVD (extra copies sell for $19 each).

All in all, it's an interesting concept, and it'll be even more interesting once Mac, Linux, and TV-streaming support arrives ("in the future," I'm told). Let's hope paranoid movie execs don't crash the party.