--Ideally, for free or for not that much money.

By encrypt, I mean a way to  make it more difficult for a DVD , authored in studio, to be unloaded to a hard drive and put up on to the internet, say, on youtube. it is a school production with kids in it. I guess this is also called copy protection. I know there are always ways to defeat an encryption scheme, but this would probably be  a 'pretty good' solution for what I am talking about.

If anyone knows of other dvd authoring sw that might please tell for my info, too.

 

I did find one response to this question in another forum. It basically said - at least as of 2 yrs ago - that for all practical purposes consumers cannot copy protect their home dvds, but can only leave a trail in the form of encoding a watermark to a recipient, then one can find who did this. This is not very practical if one were giving away lots (over 20 or 30 ) of the same dvd movie. one or two this might be practical.

 http://club.myce.com/f80/you-cant-copy-protect-your-own-dvds-133578/

Programmers - sounds like there could be a niche for you.

 

Here is a link to another thread.  As you've already learned, it's really not something available in the hobbyist field.

Ripping or copyright violation beseiges even commercial producers that use encryption.  Watermarks would have to be designed to drift randomly about the frame (perhaps using zig-zag keyframing) or else be "erased."  Where there is a will...

Your best protections are:

1. To give away the DVDs free or for a price too low to attract any contrabandist or pirate.
2. Poll the kids about which of them is the most clever "ripper" or "geek" and offer that kid a commmission to sell the discs.  The kid will know which of his peers is most apt to do mischief and know better still how to make that difficult.
3. Put it on YouTube yourself.

I found an answer in another forum and advised that there was an earlier version of studio which had this feature but may not be available. Also if you are lucky enough to find the Ulead DVD Workshop 2, this program has the ability to encrypt your DVD's.

No version of Studio has ever had this feature (well, except maybe late S10/early S11, which could "encrypt" your DVD soundtrack so that most DVD players couldn't play it back...but now I'm just being mean ).

 

Ulead DVD Workshop can't do "encryption", either.  All it can do is try to mess with the disc structure/layout/contents to make whole-disk copy programs fail...but even that isn't foolproof.

Bottom line:  If you can play a user-burned DVD back in a DVD player, you CAN extract the content from it.  You may not be able to (as easily) copy the entire disk (menu structure, etc.), but you CAN extract the video and audio streams, and that's where the real value lies.

Heck:  You CAN extract vids and auds from COMMERCIAL DVDs with "real" encryption...so what makes you think that cheap consumer tools can be any more successful?

If it makes you feel better, you can try to do some of this, and you'll probably slow down the people who try to do whole-disk-copies.  But the folks who want to "rip" the content and transfer it to a file e.g. for their ipod, PSP, etc.?  You won't do anything more that be a minor annoyance.  If it's a DVD -- If you can play it, you can rip it.

BittMann

"If it's a DVD -- If you can play it, you can rip it."

 Well said sir.... well said!             And a happy belated b'day too!

thanks for the replies. good info.

For encryption you will need to use Macromedia, not a cheap option ($$$).  There are no "free" encryptors that actually work.  And as others have said above, any encryption can be broken: where there's a will, there's a way!