DVD Burning

Yes, you can copy DVDs
You can copy DVDs, and there's plenty of software to help you do so. You need to be aware of intellectual property laws however, which make it illegal to copy copyrighted material. Specifically, under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), it's illegal for anyone to break copy-protection safeguards which are installed on commercial DVD products, whether these are movies, games, or other material.

If you're making a copy of a commercial DVD for your own use, then the policy of fair-use may eventually catch up with DVD Burning, but at the moment the copying of copyrighted material is illegal.

There's a big field of disc-copying software applications which will copy unprotected DVDs, like your home movies. We'll look at those later.

Save your home movies to DVD
You're back from vacation with a bunch of tapes that you recorded on your digital video recorder. You'd love to make your own DVD of the fun you had, so that you can send the DVDs to family and friends across the globe. This is easy to do.

Store your music on DVD
If you've got gigabytes of MP3s on your hard drive, backing them up to CD would take a long time, and you'd have a stack of CDs you'd need to find room for. A DVD musical archive solves those problems.

Archive old computer files
A backup is for data security, in case your hard drive dies. Archiving old material to disc saves space. If you've got boxes full of CD computer archives, you can get organized by copying all the CDs to a single DVD archive.

Backup your computer
When you backup to a DVD, you won't need to worry about changing CDs, since your entire backup will probably fit onto a single disc or maybe two.

Here's how to handle video files: create a separate partition on a hard drive for video files only, because videos eat up so much space. If you have a digital video recorder, you'll have gigabytes of video, and since you have the tapes, it doesn't make sense to back up the video on your computer.

Create graphic and photo presentations
With video presentation software, you can mix audio, video and images, in any combination you please, to create presentations which will wow your audience.

When you've completed the project, you can archive it to DVD, or publish it on the Web.

Use DVD in your business marketing
If your company has been sending out catalogs on CD, catalog DVDs open a whole new marketing arena. You can now include videos of products, and much more information that you can on a CD. You could even include a complete copy of your Web site.

DVDs are available in three major formats: dash (DVD-R and DVD-RW), plus (DVD+R, DVD+RW and DVD+R DL), and DVD-RAM. Most players can play both the plus and dash formats.

A DVD can contain high-definition audio, video (movies and sound) and data in these formats:

- DVD-ROM (read only, manufactured by a press)
- DVD-R/RW (R=Recordable once, RW means ReWritable)
- DVD-RAM (random access rewritable; after-write checking of data integrity is always active)
- DVD+R/RW (R=Recordable once, RW means ReWritable)

A DVD's storage capacity depends on the number of layers and sides on the DVD:

- DVD-5: single sided, single layer, 4.7 gigabytes (GB)
- DVD-9: single sided, double layer, 8.5 GB
- DVD-10: double sided, single layer on both sides, 9.4 GB
- DVD-14: double sided, double layer on one side, single layer on other, 13.3 GB
- DVD-18: double sided, double layer on both sides, 17.1 GB