Protect Your DVD from Being Copied

Before making the decision to purchase a DVD slideshow software, many people may concern an issue:” will my finished DVD be protected from being copied by others?” Unfortunately, almost none of slideshow software on the market provides copy protection like the Hollywood DVD. However, it does not mean you can’t protect DVD you make.

Hollywood DVD’s are protected by a technology called Content Scrambling System (CSS), which restricts playback of the disc on authorized devices. There are those who don’t respect the copyrights, so you want to make your photo DVD movie like the Hollywood DVD to prevent others duplicating the disc? Unluckily, you may not. At least, you can’t do this currently, since the necessary CSS license is prohibitively expensive for most consumers.

By using CSS technology, the content of the disc is encrypted and the DVD player must have a decryption key to play the DVD. The manufacturers of DVD players has licensed from the DVD CCA (DVD Copy Control Association). However, the CSS encryption technology is based on a rather weak scheme and was broken in 1999. While still illegal, it is not difficult to find software that bypass the encryption and extracts the original video from a DVD.

Two other methods are also sued on Hollywood DVDs in order to restrict the use of the disc: region encoding and Macrovision. Region encoding is like TV system. It is divided into region 1 and region 2, similar to PAL and NTSC for TV system. Region 1 DVD can only be viewed in North America and Region 2 DVD is for Europe. Macrovision can prevent DVD videos from being copied on a VCR. Both CSS and Macrovision have been circumvented.

Photo DVD Maker Pro supports creating both region 1 and region 2 DVD, but not supports CSS technology. Actually, no consumer DVD authoring software support CSS encryption so far.

Does this mean you can’t protect your own work from being stolen? Not exactly, you may add some copyright notice and watermark to stop the photos being used by unauthorized people.