Legit buyers have to activate games over the Internet, have to play with the DVD in drive and even uninstall software to make the game work on their systems.

Knowing which DVD copy protection was used on a game DVD can be helpful to determine if it makes sense buying or trying to copy the game. Talking about copying bought DVDs obviously.

A-Ray Scanner scans game DVDs and displays information about the DVD copy protection that has been used to “protect” the DVD. The software program is capable of identifying all the important DVD copy protections including SafeDisk, SecuRom or StarForce. A total of 26 different DVD copy protections can be identified by the application.

The software can scan a DVD that has been inserted into a DVD drive. It can also scan a folder on the PC’s hard drive. A-Ray Scanner will display information in the main interface if the game DVD is copy protected. If it is the protection that has been used will be listed as well.

It can deal with all kind of DVD protections that have been added to make the life of the DVD purchasers miserable while movie pirates enjoy their DVDs without those protections. The process is really that simply as described. Put a DVD into the DVD drive, make up your mind if you want the full DVD or only the main movie and hit the Start button.

Movie Backup deals with and removes DVD protections (CSS, RC, RCE, APS, UOPs and Sony ARccOS) and is compatible with PAL and NTSC DVD-5 and DVD-9 disks.

The only other selection that the user can make is to select the destination folder on his computer. The biggest plus of Movie Backup is its simplicity. It lacks a few features that would have been great, for instance the ability to create a custom DVD or convert the DVD into a compressed format. If you want to copy DVDs to the hard disk however this could be your program.

Update: The movie backup software is now available for Windows and Macintosh computers. Both systems share the same simple process. Users can now select the copy method when copying the full disc or only the main movie to their computer. The default is set to normal, which works best for unencrypted and CSS encrypted movie DVDs. The lowly enhanced and highly enhanced copying method should be selected if the program fails to copy the DVD to the local system.

You also need to make sure that you have enough free space on the hard drive.

He can select to rip a DVD from disk or hard drive to disk or hard drive. Supported are DVD5 and DVD9 dvds and copy protection is not an issue either. DVD9 disks can either be ripped in the size that they come with or compressed to fit on one DVD5 disk.

A copy of a DVD can be made with minimal user input. I only had to change the destination directory of the copy before I could hit the Start button.

Five options are available at the bottom that influence the output. Three are checked by default (Include Subtitles, Include Movie Menu and Extras, Compress to single-layer-disk DVD5). The other two are to Include DTS Audio and to Copy to dual-layer-disk which would obviously uncheck the DVD5 option.

Aplus DVD Copy is a solid application that works. Just pop a DVD in or pick one from the hard drive and click on the start button to rip it. It cannot get much easier than that. A “nice-to-have” tool.