RealNetworks settles RealDVD case, drops product, pays $4.5m

A follow up… RealNetworks settles RealDVD case, drops product, pays $4.5m…

RealNetworks says it has settled the litigation over RealDVD, its software for making copies of DVDs on PC hard drives, agreeing to a permanent injunction against sales of the product and paying $4.5 million in legal costs and other fees to six major Hollywood studios and others that challenged the technology.

Here’s our previous post from 2008….

RealDVD is being touted as one of the only legal ways to “back up” DVDs. It seems to make a copy on your drive, keeps the DRM and adds more Real player style DRM. Here’s the funny part about all this – awhile back (1999) a ton of people were sued and got in trouble for trying to back up their DVDs, it still happens to this day although rare. That said you can’t build a DVD jukebox without getting sued. Most people nowadays rip DVDs using many of the free open source tools (lots of posts on MAKE about that). Back to 1999, when the encryption(s) on the DVDs were broken allowing copies to be made (DeCSS) – they key actually came from the XingDVD player, from Xing Technologies, a subsidiary of RealNetworks. I’m pretty sure to this day 2600 magazine cannot even link to the DeCSS program, source, or anything. I’m sticking with HandBrake.

Looks like I’m still sticking with handbrake… Makers, what do you use to rip DVDs? Or are you busy making things instead of archiving movies?

2 Responses to RealNetworks settles RealDVD case, drops product, pays $4.5m

tuckerch on March 4th, 2010 at 9:30 pm said:

…has been ripped to avi via MacTheRipper and Handbrake.

I don’t share them on BitTorrent or other such like services.

My DVD, my right to do with it as I see fit in order to make it more convenient and easy to watch.

I use MacTheRipper to rip it to the hard drive, and then use Handbrake to extract the main feature and convert it. It’s a bit faster this way, less wear and tear on the optical drive and gives me an un-DRM-ed file to use if Handbrake crashes or something else interrupts the conversion process.

Once done to my satisfaction, the ripped and DRM stripped VIDEO_TS file is trashed and the avi copy is moved to the Movies folder.

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alandove on March 5th, 2010 at 8:51 am said:

I like Fairmount and MPEG Streamclip, which together give me the ability to rip and edit DVDs. The standard Mac DVD burner, iDVD, does a good job putting them on a new disk with a custom menu. I used to use MacTheRipper, but stopped when the developer got lazy with updates, and then tried to charge for the latest version. Demanding payment for software whose sole purpose is to bypass DRM seemed pretty hypocritical.

I mainly rip DVDs I’ve gotten for my daughter, and the only reason I do it is to remove the ten minutes of obnoxious ads the studios want to force my kid to watch. I’ll sit through ads if I’m getting something for free, but if I’ve paid for it, I’m entitled to skip the ads.

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