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Copy Protection for Your DVDs, Part 1

Feb 8, 2010 12:00 PM, By Jan Ozer

           

Figure 1. René Marie in concert. How to ship a DVD with copy protection?

This past year, I produced about 12 separate DVD projects ranging in quantity from five to about 200 DVDs. Simplifying the printing and replication of these projects was the Microboards MX-2 Disc Publisher that Microboards seemingly forgot about and left with me for 12 luxurious months. You can read my review of the unit here.

Inevitably, the email came requesting the unit back, and soon it will go. In the meantime, a longtime muse returned to my life, which related to a concert that I shot in 2006 of jazz singer René Marie. I shot and produced the original DVD as a freebie to test several HDV camcorders, as well as to provide a multicamera HD test project for future reviews of video editing programs. But Marie was fabulous, the sound guy was superb, my camera buddies were outstanding, and after months of color correction and noise reduction to counteract the then piss-poor lighting of the Rex Theater in Galax, Va., the finished DVD was stunning.

Marie and I traded emails, Virginia to Colorado, discussing how to potentially sell the DVD, but things never coalesced and I let it drop. A couple of weeks ago, I was reviewing some concert footage that I had uploaded to YouTube, and I coincidentally got an informational email from Marie's website discussing some of her upcoming shows.

I thought of the René Marie DVD and contacted her, asking if I could post some of her videos on YouTube. She graciously agreed (here's my favorite, though I'd use shorter transitions if I were to do it all over again), and writing of the DVD, said "I still have the ones you gave me, with some vague goal to eventually get everything together to sell them on my website."

So I started thinking about that again, and my thoughts quickly ran to copy protection. Sure I could replicate the disc and add copy protection that way, but that involves up-front costs and order minimums. While I could quickly run off a few hundred DVDs on my soon to be disappearing MX-2, how could I protect them from being illegally copied in the field? This is a constant problem for event folks like myself, particularly wedding and other small distribution productions where one technologically savvy miscreant in a small, relatively closed group of buyers can really cut into your profits. Selling an additional 10 DVDs at $20 a pop for all 12 productions last year would have added $2,400 to my coffers, not an insignificant amount. Then I remembered that Microboards offered copy protection as a feature of the MX-2. Based upon Patronus copy protection from Fortium Technologies, Microboards "VideoWrite wraps the video on the DVD in a protective file that doesn't interfere with playback but prevents common ripping software programs from accessing the video," according to Microboards.

"Patronus introduces copy control encapsulation in areas of the disc not read by DVD players during playback," according to the Fortium website. "Complying with the DVD standard, the original content is not modified and playback quality remains unaffected."

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