Introduction

DVD burners have come down in price quite a bit over the past year. The hardware is now affordable to most consumers out in the market yet the software support is still somewhat lacking. Sure people can create simple DVDs using third party software applications such as MyDVD or DVD Workshop or Apple’s iDVD. However most people still want a DVD burner for one major reason – backing up DVD movie titles. We won’t go into the legal ramifications of backing up a DVD, but what we will do is take a look at one of the latest titles to come out of 321 Studios called DVD XCopy XPRESS. This package can be considered a “lite” version of their popular DVD XCopy which has seen the wrath of various movie studio houses. DVD XCopy XPRESS is an attempt to simplify the backup procedures to a brain dead process. Let’s take a look at this works out.

So what can it do?

DVD XCopy XPRESS claims to offer the following features:
- Making 1:1 backup copies of DVD movies
- Fitting an entire movie onto one disc
- Highest possible audio and video quality
- Supports both NTSC and PAL movies
- Anti-Piracy Protection

These are pretty lofty goals for a simple application. Those of you who have dabbled with DVD XCopy will appreciate the notion of being able to take one regular DVD and burn it onto one DVD-R/+R disc. Most consumer DVD titles use DVD9 media since they easily eat up more than 4.7GB of space. Since DVD XCopy looks to make an exact copy of consumer DVD titles, you will normally need two DVD 4.7GB blanks to fit one title with all the extra features and trailers. However, most individuals don’t really care about the trailers or extra special features – they just want a backup of the movie and the English sound track. This is where DVD Xcopy XPRESS comes in. The basic goal of this application is to copy just the movie and the sound track onto one DVD. If the movie can not normally fit onto one DVD-R/+R disc, then the audio and video will be reencoded (compressed further) to fit accordingly.

Installation

I received my copy of DVD XCopy XPRESS off of the 321 studios website via a direct download. If you previously own DVD XCopy, you can obtain a free copy of DVD XCopy XPRESS. But even if you don’t have DVD XCopy, the XPRESS version is pretty darn cheap.

The application installed easily on my new dual processor system. I have this application installed side by side with DVD XCopy and it posed no problems at all.

Using the application

Starting up the application, you will see a dialog box pop up asking you if the DVD that you are backing up is a rental or borrowed DVD. Why the question? Well if you happen to answer yes to the question then DVD XCopy XPRESS will not run. DVD XCopy doesn’t want you to be backing up rental or borrowed DVDs so answer no if you really own this DVD!

Once the application starts up, you’ll see a truly simple user interface. There is one large round green button on the right that says “START” and another button that says “OPTIONS”. The options section gives you the opportunity to choose what target audio language and subtitles you need for your backup video. You can also change the temporary path from which DVD XCopy XPRESS uses to store the files that it reads from the DVD source disc. (Make sure you have enough disk space to store the files that are on the source DVD).

 

When you’re ready to start the backing up process, insert your DVD that you want to back up and press the START button. DVD XCopy XPRESS will now proceed to read the disc and save the data to the hard disk. The beauty of this application is that it will select only the movie title and one audio soundtrack. It will not try and copy all the extraneous titles that can be found on a typical DVD these days.

Once the read sequence is done, the application will either reencode the video to make sure the movie fits on one DVD or it will begin the write process immediately. Pop a blank DVD-R/+R and hit the START button. If you already had a blank DVD-R in the burner, then the application will ask you before it begins the read process whether it can automatically burn the disc when it’s ready.

The burner that we used for this application was the Pioneer DVR-105 drive which supports 4X burning. However, I only had 2X media on hand and thus the burn took approximately 30 minutes to finish. Once the burn is finished, the DVD is ejected by the application and you’re all set to test out the disc.

Quality

We backed up a couple of titles and played them back on an older Panasonic consumer DVD player and the discs all played back successfully. The application will not encode any menus onto the DVD. Once you insert the DVD, the movie will immediately start up. All the chapters are preserved but no menu will show. It’s important to note that DVD XCopy XPRESS will not work on episodic DVDs such as Six Feet Under or Band of Brothers. If you want to back up episodic DVDs, look into DVD XCopy.

Original Clip from Swingers	Frame from Backed Up Swingers

The real test was whether DVD XCopy XPRESS could take a large movie such as Saving Private Ryan and fit it onto one disk. If it did do this – what would the end result be like in terms of quality? When it came to movies that are around two hours or less, DVD XCopy XPRESS worked wonderfully. When we tried to back up Saving Private Ryan, we noticed a degradation in video quality which was a direct result of the application trying to get the video to fit onto one 4.7GB disc. The resulting video had some pixelation in the video stream during some slow scenes which was very noticeable during playback.

Original frame from Saving Private Ryan	Frame from Backup DVD

The only other problem we had was an occasional hiccup at the beginning of chapters. When one chapter ends, there is an occasional delay until the next chapter. We tried the DVD on a computer software player and it played just fine. However it does appear that some other users are witnessing this problem also. 321 Studios have identified the problem and will release a fix for this in the near future.

After playing with the application for a few days, I found that it worked fairly well as advertised. For any movie that is two hours or so in length, DVD XCopy XPRESS will easily back up the title and you will be pleased with the resulting output. If your movie is longer than that, it might be better to use DVD XCopy to back up the movie across two 4.7GB DVD discs. You’ll hold onto the quality of the original title which in my opinion is more important than fitting the movie onto one DVD.

Ah yes if you are wondering whether DVD XCopy XPRESS will make further backups of a backup – then the answer is no. We tested this out and DVD XCopy XPRESS would not let us start the backup process.

Summary

Legal issues aside, 321 Studios has a pretty darn good product in DVD XCopy XPRESS. It takes the great qualities that you find in DVD XCopy and makes it nearly idiot proof for most users out there who only care about backing up their movie titles. There are still some issues to be worked out in the application. There are occasional hiccups in the chapters and the video quality for long movies can suffer from further video compressions. It isn’t always true that DVD XCopy XPRESS will give a perfect 1:1 copy of your movie. If the movie will already fit onto one DVD 4.7GB disc, then yes, this is probably true. If it’s too long to fit on one disc, then expect to see some degradation. As I mentioned before, in those instances, you are better served using the higher end application, DVD XCopy. However this is still an excellent application for those who have DVD burners and really don’t have the time to learn all the intricacies of using DVD backup software. It still has some flaws and bugs but 321 Studios has been pretty good at releasing updates fixing them as they arise. Give it a spin – you might be pleasantly surprised.

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