This is a Sponsored Post written by me on behalf of 123 Media Max. All opinions are 100% mine.
I love watching movies. I have a ton of DVDs and I’m pretty careful about how I treat them. Still, I’ve backed some of my movies up in the past with other software, so I am not unfamiliar with how it’s done. I was given the opportunity, today, to review some software that not only copies DVDs, but is also a Blu-Ray Copy Breakthrough. I don’t have a Blue-Ray player (although I should by now), but I wanted to give it a try anyway, so I did.
Why Should I Back Up My Movies?
Like CDs, DVDs are prone to getting scratched up. All it takes is for you to have a movie night and leave one out while swapping movies because the case wasn’t immediately available. The probability of scratched DVDs and Blue-Ray movies increases exponentially with each child you have in the house. At $15, $20, or more per DVD and Blue-Ray disc, it’s a good idea to back them up.
Copy and Burn Blue-Ray and DVD Movies
The core functionality of 123 Media Max is copying movies, so right after installing, I threw in my Napoleon Dynamite DVD and fired up the software. After choosing to copy a DVD straight, it prompted me for the media I wanted to copy, including my DVD in the list. The selection box was a little small, but I chose my DVD and it told me that my DVD may have copyright protection on it and asked if I wanted to look for a plugin that would get past it. I opted to look and seconds later, I was downloading Boooya to get around the copy encryption. After another quick install, I was copying.
In software I tried in the past, I had to run a tray application (all the time) before I even thought about backing up a DVD. Then I would run a second application to do all the work. I like that this uses a plugin that loads only when needed. After about 20 minutes, the DVD data was copied and I swapped the DVD for a blank DVD to write to.
After about 40-50 minutes total, I had installed both the application and the plugin, copied the DVD, and burned it to a blank disc. This was also faster than software I had tried previously and easier, too. I tried my new backup and before I knew it, that goofy 80′s kid was distracting me from my review.
Additional Features
123 Media Max has, so far, proven to be better than the software I tried in the past, but here’s where it slaps that other software around and makes it cry uncle (well, almost). After you’re done backing up all your movies, you can get more out of the purchase price by converting videos from one format to another and even downloading and converting videos from the Internet. In about two minutes, I told 123 Media Max I wanted to find video online, searched (within the program) for the Tron trailer, found it on MetaCafe, and downloaded and converted it to an AVI on my drive. The only problem I had was that it didn’t find videos on YouTube that I know exist. Hopefully that will be fixed in another version, but it’s pretty cool even without YouTube. Although I haven’t tried it, 123 Media Max also boasts the ability to convert from DVR and TIVO files as well, which I think is a great feature for anyone with one of these devices.
Conclusions
This software should copy your Blue-Ray movies while maintaining the great quality. In my tests, it performed great and did more than expected. If you don’t want to worry about losing your Blue-Ray or DVD collection, or find that they often get scratched up, 123 Media Max is a good investment for your collection at just under $70.
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