Digital Home Thoughts: AnyDVD: The Tasty Secret Sauce

AnyDVD is one of those programs that is simple on the surface, but its simplicity belies how powerful this program is at what it does. Ripping a DVD and encoding it for other purposes – whether it be backing it up so your kids don't ruin the original, or making a version of the DVD for playback on your portable video player, always involves several steps.

The first is often the most difficult for people new at the process: cracking the encryption. See, those Hollywood movie companies don't want you to be able to use that DVD for any more than watching it in a DVD player on your TV. They want you to have to buy another copy for watching on your portable video player, they just haven't quite figured out how yet (Vongo is a step in that direction). And replacing a DVD when your kid scratches the original? They want you to go buy a new one of course. To force you into that, they encrypt the video files on the DVD so that a standard computer can play them back, but can't copy them off the disc or do anything with them. Try putting a DVD in your computer, browsing the disc, and try to copy one of the VOB files off it. Your computer will give you an error and the copy will fail. The concept behind AnyDVD is a simple one: it cracks that encryption, allowing you to do what you want with the DVD that you bought.


Figure 1: The interface you can access when a DVD is inserted.

When I first installed AnyDVD (there's a 21 day free trial), I didn't realize that it wasn't really a "program" in the strict sense of the word. When it loads it sits in your system tray – there's no user interface that pops up. It's lightweight and uses up very little memory. I don't even notice when it's running – system impact is negligible. The magic happens when you put in a DVD. As the DVD is loaded by the PC, AnyDVD intercepts the DVD data stream and removes the encryption. It's like pixie dust!

It Just Works
That copy that failed before? It will now work – you can put in a commercial DVD, drag a VOB file off the DVD, and play it on your PC (if you have a program that plays VOB files). Want to edit it? Change the extension from VOB to MPG and you can open the file in your favourite video editor (assuming it supports MPEG2) and you can slice, dice, and export it back out again. You can feed that MPEG2 file to the Windows Media Encoder and get any size and bit rate file you want (the Encoder is a bit glitchy using this method though). In short, AnyDVD is the secret sauce that allows you to do more with DVDs than you could before. There's a big trend with video editing software now to include tools to work directly with DVDs, but because of the DCMA, software companies based in the USA can't include any method of breaking the DVD encryption. Slysoft is based in the Antigua, so they have no such limitations. AnyDVD unleashes the power of your software.

One of the things I found particularly powerful is that when you have AnyDVD running, those encrypted commercial DVDs are as easy to manipulate as the homemade ones you burned last year. Roxio has a Media Import tool as part of their Easy Media Creator 8 suite that allows you to select any part of the DVD, chapter by chapter, and it will rip an MPEG2 file, encode a WMV file (without interlacing, sadly), or a DivX file. Adobe's Premiere Elements 2 can open files directly off the DVD and you can edit them like any other file - it's a thing of beauty. And the new breed of one-step video transcoding tools for taking DVDs and spitting out portable-media friendly files suddenly work much better. The combination of AnyDVD and CloneDVD Mobile (review coming soon!), made by the same company, is particularly powerful. They offer discounts when you purchase multiple programs at the same time.