BDlot DVD Clone Ultimate

A lesson I learned as a new parent is that there are great uses for a DVD ripper/cloning application that does not include piracy...that lesson is, kids wreck stuff. So, when I buy my kids DVD's of their favorite movies, I have copied them, and given the copies to the kids, when it's wrecked, create another, and repeat as necessary.

Years ago this was much easier to do, but over the years, there has been an onslaught of new protection schemes, bloated or "corrupt" files that wreck a burn and various other issues. DVD Clone Ultimate is a new software I stumbled across and figured I'd give it a go.

Overall it was a pretty impressive experience, it has quiet a few options to facilitate most anyone with a PC and a burner.

The obvious tools involve the ripping of a DVD. It can be ripped to a second DVD, just doing a sector by sector duplication of the DVD, but, in addition to that one can rip the VIDEO_TS right to the hard drive or USB drive, In addition you can back up just the main movie to an MPEG2 file, which often uses about half the space of a full DVD. If you choose to rip the DVD to your hard drive or USB, there is also a burning utility to burn it to an empty DVD, which allows people with only a single DVD drive to be able to do a duplication as well. 

They advertise the fact it will remove all known protections, and, while I can not verify that, I can say it hasn't choked on a DVD I have thrown at it yet.

The interface is very slick, easy to use and logical. Anyone that has used any DVD ripping or backup application will be able to figure this application out. That said, there were some things that I wondered "huh, what's that". A little in application help would be kind of nice, though it wouldn't need to be much. It's likely something as simple as thorough tool tip descriptions by each option/form field would be of use.

I did, however, have a couple issues. One, was during the VIDEO_TS rip, the application builds a weird directory structure, and it will never go into the folder you tell it to, but, it's easily copied into the folder you wanted originally. Additionally, I had some problems with the MPEG2 encoder on one DVD where it would rip the wrong language audio.

I did report both of those bugs to BDlot, and they responded within a couple days that they did verify the bugs existed, and the VIDEO_TS path bug was fixed, and they will be fixing the wrong language issue during the next development cycle as it's a bigger issue that requires some resources. So, while not particularly happy about the delay of such a critical fix for what I see as a serious bug, the personal response that wasn't a simple form email was certainly nice...much better than you get from many software makers.