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I would describe my experience/understanding as intermediate. I have backed up probably around a hundred DVDs the same way in the last year, using the same media, and always had success.
Lost in Space season 2 presents a serious challenge that I need to solve before one of my kids scratches one of the original discs. Each disc contains four episodes with a main menu to allow selection of a particular episode (an essential feature on these TV show multiple episod DVDs). Each episode also has its own title menu. Here's what I do -- which worked great with Lost in Space season 1 -- but which is definitely not working with season 2. I rip to the hard drive with DVD Decrypter and use Nero Recode 2 (part of Nero Ultra 6) to "disable" two of the four episodes on each disc. This way I don't have to use any compression for the two episodes I do copy. I leave the menus intact so that I may select which of the episodes on the backup disc to watch. The "disabling" of the two disabled episodes consists of simply replacing each such episode with a blank screen, which takes up much less space on the backup disc and allows no-compression copying with full menu functionality. I burn to the backup disc (Ritek Ridata 4x DVD+R) with Nero Recode 2 and voila! -- there's my backup. (I make two backups per original disc by alternating pairs of episodes to disable).
As I said, this method worked fine on Lost in Space season 1, but with season 2 all I get is the FBI warning and the Interpol warning, and then the DVD player actually turns off! These backups play fine on my computer, by the way. My standalone player is a Sony DVP NS300. Nothing fancy but always otherwise serviceable.
I have since loaded up AnyDVD on my computer and ripped with it in the background, with "remove annoying adverts and trailers" and "jump directly to title menu" selected. When I popped the resulting backup disc into the DVD player, it did give me the main menu (and no FBI or Interpol warnings), but the menu would not respond when I selected an episode. The little highlight indicator next to an episode title would flash and then disappear, and the DVD player would then show the little "play" arrow on its display, but nothing else would happen. (At least the player didn't turn off.)
I have not seen any other posts describing anything quite like this. Am I witnessing some new generation of copy protection? Anyone know any workarounds? I will be really miffed if one of the discs gets scratched and I have to replace the entire box set just for one episode!
Thanks for any insight.
--edexley
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