I have a video DVD that I cannot copy to my hard disk.
When I select all files and folders they are about 250 MB. When I check the DVD drive in "My Computer" it is about 4 GB. All the mail VOB files are 0 KB in size.
When I right-click the DVD drive in "My Computer" and click Play in VLC Media Player, then VLC plays it very well.
Where on earth are these huge video files?
The things that I have so far unsuccessfully tried:
- Opening the DVD in a Linux environment. (But it only showed two small system files.)
- All the things in "Folder Options" regarding Hidden Files and Hidden System Files.
- Image-making software like UltraISO, but it takes them forever to finish (hard disk LED stays on; no blinking, which means there's something wrong).
- No use doing various Command Line commands regarding changing file attributes.
Best Answer
You are right- DVDs should be nothing else than a bunch of data that can be copied. In fact they are. Just that the movie- industry tries and tried hard to protect them from being copied.
What you see is most probably some copy protection 1.
If your's was broken by someone and if it is legal (in your country) to make a copy by breaking the protection - either as personal backup or for others won't be easy to answer.
But when VLC can play your DVD my first guess would be 2 is circumventing the copy protection.
Every DVD- Ripping tool with the same capabilities as VLC (using the same library would be a hint) would be worth a try.
Just an idea how copy protection systems possibly work:
In early days computer disks had comparably few data capacity. As the data was stored on a single magnetic film disk (hence their name) it wasn't to hard to find out where exactly a portion of information was stored. So they used lasers and other tools to destroy tiny portions of that film.
Appropriate Software was aware of that error - it could even require that error to occur as part of the protection.
But others simply (tried to) read that sector and the read error caused them to cancel the action of reading/copying the data.
This way - depending on how the software was designed - it might have happened that this standard- software showed the correct memory usage of a disk, but couldn't even show a list of the files and directories on it.
Hope this explanation is more helpful than smart ass alack;)