There is no secret that DVD copying tools are all over the place. All of them are competing in terms of features, speed, accuracy, audio and video quality. Their prices range from about $30 to almost $70. The only thing left to do is choose the right one.

For CD cloning we had the magnificent CloneCD from SlySoft. The CD age has passed pretty rapidly so we are going to deal for a while with DVDs and for them we have CloneDVD, a tool that can make perfect copies of your DVDs. Thus you can save them from any damage that may occur by creating backups.

There is more than one CloneDVDs available on Softpedia.com, but the one analyzed today is developed by CloneDVD.Net. The other softwares with more or less the same name belong to Elaborate Bytes (creator of CloneCD and the mobile version from SlySoft). The price of our subject has been cut off from $69.95 to a mere $49, that is a $30 discount.

Almost all DVD backup tools are the same. I mean they are all equipped with burners and the technology to skip the copy protection. Furthermore, this type of software also allows the user to customize the resulting file. Sometimes a DVD may include more than you want (subtitles and audio in a myriad of languages, features that you do not want to keep etc.). DVD copying software generally lets you choose the files that you want to keep in the final copy.

8' 40''. That’s the amount of time CloneDVD.Net's CloneDVD took to backup my Finding Neverland DVD video (bad sectors included) on my 3GB+ Sempron, 1GB memory system. There were some issues towards the end of the disc, but CloneDVD handled them properly and the result was a perfect 1:1 copy of the DVD. And when I say perfect I really mean it, as – by comparing the two files - I could see no difference.

Besides the regular features that enable the user to backup the DVDs, CloneDVD is also equipped with an image maker option. Thus, you can convert the movie on the DVD disc directly into an ISO file and save it on your computer. The process takes twice the time of a regular DVD5 copying as the software will complete the task in two steps: copying the file in a temporary folder and then converting and saving it in the user specified folder. The bad part is that there is no reciprocity in this sense and the ISO file cannot be written on a DVD disc using this program.

When burning, if the media inserted in the drive is not empty, the application can do that for you by quick formatting the DVD, provided that you are using a DVD-RW (too bad that in our test the application failed to finish the task and generated an error). Writing on a DVD, just like converting the data into ISO file, is done in two steps also and, again, the software is moving first the files in a temporary directory and then it proceeds to burning.

The time for burning a file on DVD was of 37'14'' in our case.

The options menu is not as rich as I thought; in fact, it contains only four sections: language (choose from the myriad of languages), burn engine selection, work space folder (define a temporary folder for the program to work with; the drive of its location should have at least 10GB of free space) and miscellaneous (enable the software to delete temporary files when the task is done and turn off the computer when the job is finished).

Another interesting feature is its ability of creating regular movie files from the DVD video file. Unfortunately, the conversion took an awfully long time on my computer. In 26 minutes the progress bar showed about 10%. The conversion formats are AVI, ASF, MP4 for Apple iPod, 3GP or MP4 for Sony PSP. The settings button in the far right part allows the user to configure the application so that the result meets his/her needs (quality, resolution, bitrate, framerate, the audio format etc.).

The Good

The price of the application dropped from almost $70 to only $49. Copying the DVD is easy and fast. Easy to use and handle, it is a reliable tool for backing up your DVDs.

The Bad

The application has a number of bugs that should have been fixed with this new version. For example the error when erasing the DVD-RW, or the fact that the eager beaver took the burning of the DVD file to 101%. Of course, at one moment it came to its senses and dropped to the normal value of 100%.

The Truth

The copying function is reliable enough and the result is a perfect copy of the original. So the quality is not an issue here.

Here are some snapshots of the application in action: