How do I archive movies?

There are many ways to do it, but what you need to worry about is encryption.  Movie studios place encryption protection on their movies to prevent you from copying them.  But, from everything I've read you are able to make a backup copy of your movie legally.

What do I need?
First, you will need a fatty hard drive to hold all of your movies.  I recommend 1 terabyte or more.  You'll need a DVD drive obviously.  You will also need software in most cases.

Why should I do this?
Well, if you have kids you can look at the state you DVDs may be in and cringe.  I have found it is best to store you movies on a computer where the kids can't scratch them, step on them, or break them.  If you have an Xbox, or media center PC you can play these movies directly from you computer onto you TV.  You would also want to do this because keeping a library of DVDs does not look that great in the front room.  If you have them all stored away it's more convenient to get to them, and less time consuming searching for them.

I recommend using DVDshrink for you free option.  The paid option I recommend using is a combination of two different software: CloneDVD and AnyDVD.  They both have an evaluation period of 21 days, but that should be long enough to archive your complete library of movies.  AnyDVD is a way of decrypting those protected DVDs you have so that CloneDVD can copy them.  DVDshrink may also need to have a DVD decrypted, and it is recommended that you use software called DVDdecryptor.

Here is a video tutorial on how to copy a DVD with CloneDVD:



Now, if you want to go the free route you can use DVDshrink, and here is a video tutorial on how to use it:



DvDshrink is not the only free option out there.  If you do a simple Google search you'll be able to find others.  I just like to use it.  I find it's fast and as long as the disk isn't encrypted it does a good job.