Pinnacle Instant Copy

Instant Copy is a DVD and CD copying application from Pinnacle, a company that knows an awful lot about creating and recording videos. Instant Copy has just one task in life, to copy the contents of a DVD or CD onto another disk, but it aims to do it as painlessly as possible.

At its simplest, you put a blank DVD-R or DVD-RW disk in your DVD writer, a source disk in your DVD player, run the program and click on "Copy". For many tasks the default settings within the program won't need changing.

The software goes away and copies up to 4.7 GB of data from your source DVD, saving it on an intermediate file on your hard drive before writing it out to the destination drive. This is the default copying method, but you can set up a suitably equipped computer to copy on-the-fly as well, where data is transferred directly from DVD drive to DVD drive, without being stored temporarily in between.

It takes a while to make a copy--4.7 GB is a lot of data--but a couple of progress bars show you how far things are along. This is not so much a time to go and make a coffee--that's coffee, not copy--but to cook a main meal, eat it and do the washing-up. It's quicker to copy a full DVD than to watch it, but it can still take well over an hour to complete.

You don't have to transfer between two identical disk types. Instant Copy can move video files from DVD to Video CD and Super VCD and also handles CD copying. This means you can break down multi-file DVDs onto a number of CDs, which can be read on just about any computer with a CD drive. And a final caveat: if you're looking at Instant Copy to copy commercial DVDs, you can think again. The program specifically excludes any copy-protected DVDs, saying politely why it can't copy a disk which has protection on it. --Simon Williams

Featuring a user-friendly interface and unique compression technology, Pinnacle Systems InstantCopy software rapidly burns flawless copies of DVDs and CDs. It makes true 1:1 copies of DVDs that contain all the DVD content, including the main movie, menus, languages, subtitles and bonus material. It also transfers DVD movies to Video CDs and Super VCDs that can be played on nearly any PC or home DVD player. Finally, InstantCopy makes perfect bit-for-bit copies of your CD media including data, music and video thanks to its support of all CD formats, all recordable CD formats and most CD drives.