To burn or not to burn? That is the question. Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the absence of your DVD collection on your hard drive, or to take arms against those who poison your collection with various "protections," and by opposing end them.

If you side with the latter camp, then you'll be interested in DVDFab HD Decrypter, a free program for Windows that copies an entire DVD movie to your hard drive, and removes all the protections (CSS, RC, RCE, APS, UOPs and Sony ARccOS) while copying. The program also provides full HD-DVD and Blu-Ray support (hence the "HD" in the name).

The program is straightforward. Insert a DVD and click Start, and DVDFab HD Decrypter will copy the DVD contents (the Video_TS folder) to a specified location on your hard drive.

You'll notice that the interface includes a lot of extra menu items on the sidebar, including Split, Customize, Merge; as well as various options to convert the DVD file to a format playable on various mobile devices. If those options make your mouth water, take notice: they're only available in the Platinum version ($50). The only function of the free version is to make a direct backup of a DVD to your hard drive. If that's what you're looking for, then you've found it.

Version 4.0.6.2 includes some bug fixes and new features. Windows only.