What's the best way to make a copy of a DVD?

There is a variety of DVD ripping software out there. You’ll just choose one you like and rip the content into a soft dvx file on Windows, provided you have a DVD drive on your PC of course.

Lifehacker has posted a decent article on this with good suggestions for ripping tools, and they are a trustworthy source, so here’s that: http://lifehacker.com/380702/five-best-dvd-ripping-tools

DVD Fab is quite nice.
One Click is okay.
DVD Shrink is nice
The rest I cant say we don’t know if the Obama administration is tapping into Fluther… ;-(

I’ll second dvd fab and dvd shrink!! Also, if you want to convert your dvds to playable files try handbrake.

From what I’ve been reading, there seems to be at least several distinct steps and processes involved. First is to “rip” the source DVD onto the PC hard drive, and then you decrypt, encode, convert and/or compress or whatever else it is you need to do. Finally, you burn the destination disc. Am I following all this correctly?

But if I don’t want/need to do any decrypting, encoding, compressing, or whatever, and all I want is to make a copy, my question is why can’t you just to copy the DVD onto the hard drive, then copy the file back onto a blank DVD? Maybe using Windows DVD Maker?

The fact that nobody talks about doing it this way leads me to believe that the process that I just described is either not recommended or not possible. Maybe the copying software can’t do it this way. Am I right?

Thank you everyone for your responses. Pardon my ignorance.

You have to strip off the regional encoding and encryption. DVDFab will do that and it’s easy to use.It will make physical copies as well. After that is done you can convert the dvd files into one file using something like handbrake. Then you can watch your legally owned movies on your tablet and such….

Thank you, @ARE_you_kidding_me. I suppose all this decryption, encoding, conversion, etc., is just to give yourself more options and to put the content in the format that you want.

@2davidc8 yes, some players won’t play the files unless they are free of all of that nonsense