9 Best Free DVD Copy Software for Windows/Mac

While streaming is the standard today, many people still cherish a physical library of rare films and home videos. Modern computers rarely include disc drives. Physical discs also face the threat of rot and scratches. Digitizing your collection has become a necessary step for preservation.

The real difficulty lies in finding reliable free DVD copy software among many misleading options. The market includes open-source projects, limited freeware, and premium tools with free trials. Many of these programs cannot bypass the copy protection found on modern discs without a paid upgrade.

Our team spent a month testing various programs to find the most effective solutions. We evaluated them using Hollywood movies, TV box sets, and homemade discs to ensure they deliver high-quality results.

The following list features the top 9 free DVD copy software picks for 2026. These options include 100% free tools and professional trials that provide the best balance of speed and decryption power.

Legal note: Use DVD copy software only with homemade discs and other media you own. Copyright rules vary by region.

What You Want from Free DVD Copy Software

Before choosing a program, you should understand that copying a disc can mean different things. Selecting the wrong method can result in files that are too large to store or videos that look blurry. To help you find the right free DVD copy software, we have categorized the four primary tasks these programs perform:

1:1 DVD Cloning (Full Backup): This creates an exact digital replica of your disc as an ISO image or a VIDEO_TS folder. It preserves original menus and all audio tracks. It's best way to archive rare collector's editions.

DVD Ripping and Transcoding (Space Saving): This involves converting the video into formats like MP4 and MKV. The software re-encodes the video to reduce file size. This is ideal for playback on mobile devices and media servers.

DVD Remuxing (Lossless Extraction): Remuxing extracts the original video and audio streams into a new container without re-encoding. You get original quality without the disc menus. The files remain large.

DVD Burning (Physical Duplication): Some users need to create a physical backup. This task requires free DVD copy software with a burning engine to write data onto a blank DVD-R.

Very few tools perform every task perfectly. HandBrake is excellent for transcoding but cannot clone a disc. MakeMKV specializes in lossless remuxing. Our list identifies which free DVD copy software excels at each task to save you time.

How We Benchmark Free DVD Copy Software

Not all free DVD copy software is created equal, especially when handling modern encryption. To provide an objective ranking, our team put dozens of tools through a rigorous benchmark using three real-world scenarios:

• Basic: An unprotected homemade DVD to test core backup speed and output playback.
• Complex: A 101-minute encrypted blockbuster to test decryption stability and H.264 conversion quality.
• Advanced: A multi-title TV series disc to evaluate title mapping, subtitle retention, and lossless extraction.

Tests were conducted on a standard Windows 11 workstation (AMD Ryzen 5/48GB RAM) using an internal drive. We prioritized hardware acceleration where available and averaged the results of multiple runs to ensure accuracy. Each free DVD copy software was evaluated on decryption power, processing speed, output integrity, and whether the "free version" imposed hidden limits like watermarks or length caps.

Quick Comparison of the Best DVD Copy Software

Top 9 Best Free DVD Copy Software (Full Review)

1. VideoProc Converter AI

Available for: Windows 11/10/8.1/8/7 macOS 10.13 and later

If you have DVDs with regional locks, 99-title discs, copy-protected DVDs, or older DVDs with file systems that other software cannot handle, VideoProc Converter AI is the perfect solution. It can bypass even the latest DVD encryption technologies, including Disney’s Fake Option, X-project, CSS, UOPs, APS, RCE, Sony ARccOS, and region codes, allowing you to copy or back up your discs without restrictions.

The real benefit of VideoProc Converter AI is its multiple DVD copy modes, designed to retain the original quality of a physical DVD. You can choose 1:1 Copy, Full Title Copy, Main Movie Copy, ISO, or VIDEO_TS, depending on whether you want an exact clone, a complete backup, or just the main content.

By default, the main movie is selected, but you also have the flexibility to choose specific DVD titles or chapters. You can customize which audio and subtitle tracks to include, extract audio only, or preserve menus, trailers, and bonus content. DVDs can be copied to MP4, MKV, and more popular formats. With support for modern, high-efficiency codecs like AV1, HEVC, and H.264, you can rip DVDs to the smallest possible file size without any visible loss in quality.

Let's Take a Close Look on It's Backup Features

✔️ 6 Backup Modes

• Main Movie Content Copy: Flexibly select video and audio tracks to digitize only the content you want.
• Full Title Copy: Backup all titles, chapters, subtitles, trailers, hidden tracks, and audio for a complete copy.
• ISO: Create a 1:1 clone of the DVD as an ISO image, preserving 100% of the original content and structure.
• VIDEO_TS: Copy the DVD to a VIDEO_TS folder with full content intact, ready for burning.
• DVD to MKV: Convert the entire DVD content to MKV for playback on computers, mobile devices, tablets, and TVs.
• DVD to MKV H264: Copy the full DVD title to MKV using H.264 encoding for high compatibility and quality.

✔️ Rip DVD for Digital Playback

Besides building a digital library by backing up DVDs on Windows 10/8/7, VideoProc Converter AI can also convert DVDs to mobile- or console-friendly formats such as MP4, MOV, AVI, and more, allowing offline playback anywhere, anytime.

✔️ Edit Before Ripping or Copying

A bonus feature is the built-in editing tools. Click the edit icon to rotate videos, add subtitles or effects, trim or cut segments, and then rip the DVD exactly as you want.

Pros:

• Read slightly damaged/scratched DVDs, and bypass all kinds of known copy protections.
• Support level-3 hardware acceleration to copy, back up and convert DVDs at 1:1 quality.
• Additional AI features to upscale and enhance low-quality DVD footage to UHD 4K.

Cons:

• Cannot work on Linux.

Free Download VideoProc Converter AI to Preserve Your Precious DVD Collections

2. MakeMKV – Best for Lossless DVD-to-MKV Copies

Best for: Users who want to preserve the original DVD video, audio, subtitles, and chapters in MKV without transcoding.

Supported OS: Windows, macOS, and Linux.

Price: DVD and AVCHD conversion is free. Blu-ray functionality is shareware, although beta keys may temporarily unlock all features.

MakeMKV does one job especially well: it moves the original streams from a DVD into an MKV container without re-encoding them. The video is not recompressed, so the copy retains the source resolution, bitrate, audio tracks, subtitles, and chapter information you choose to keep.

The workflow is simple. Open the disc, wait for MakeMKV to analyze the titles, select the movie or episodes you need, choose the desired tracks, and start the remux. Because it avoids video encoding, processing is generally limited more by disc reading and structure analysis than by CPU or GPU speed.

Why Choose MakeMKV

• Preserve the original MPEG-2 video and compatible audio streams.
• Keep several audio languages, commentary tracks, and subtitle streams in one MKV.
• Retain chapter markers from the original disc.
• Choose a movie, episode, or bonus feature from the scanned title list.

Where it falls short: MakeMKV creates MKV files only. It does not compress the video, create MP4 files, make ISO images, preserve an interactive DVD menu, or burn another disc. The output can also require considerable storage space.

Verdict: MakeMKV is the best option when you want a high-quality digital copy without re-encoding and have enough storage for large MKV files.

2. HandBrake

Best for: Users who want detailed control when converting homemade or otherwise unprotected DVDs to MP4, MKV, or WebM.

Supported OS: Windows 11, recent macOS versions, and Linux. Windows 10 is currently marked as deprecated by the HandBrake project.

Price: Free and open-source.

Developed as a converter, HandBrake can modernize your DVD into computer-playable format, namely, MP4, MKV, and WebM. It is not a dedicated DVD copy software for Windows 11/10 and Mac, but it is free and open source. It works nicely to copy homemade DVDs, as no decryption is required. For DVDs that you bought from stores, such as music videos or movies, Handbrake cannot skip the copy protection to rip the media. If you are tech-savvy, you can install a libdvdcss package from VideoLan. For Windows computers, you will need to download the .dll file and copy it into the installation folder of Handbrake, while for Mac, you may need to use command tools if you are on Yosemite and newer an OS.

Handbrake can copy the DVD one title per time. You have to configure HandBrake manually to copy each title and queue them up, so that the program starts ripping one title after another. Let's say there are 57 titles in the DVD, you will have to configure and queue the episode 57 times before starting to copy the DVD to the computer.

Why Choose HandBrake

• Encode by constant quality or average bitrate and adjust the encoder preset, profile, and level.
• Convert DVD footage to H.264, HEVC, AV1, VP9, and other supported codecs.
• Deinterlace, detelecine, denoise, sharpen, crop, scale, and correct common DVD-video issues.
• Keep the tracks you need and configure passthrough or re-encoding options.
• Use supported Intel, NVIDIA, AMD, or Apple hardware encoders.
• No paid edition, subscription, or locked export feature.

Where it falls short: HandBrake re-encodes the video, cannot preserve an interactive DVD menu, and cannot produce a full ISO or VIDEO_TS clone. Its numerous codec, quality, and filter settings can also feel technical to beginners.

Verdict: In our protected-disc benchmark, HandBrake could list selectable titles, but it did not natively decrypt either commercial test DVD. The resulting encoded video was heavily corrupted. This does not affect its usefulness for unprotected discs, but it demonstrates why HandBrake should not be described as a complete commercial DVD copying solution.

4. BurnAware Free – Best Lightweight DVD-to-ISO Tool

Best for: Windows users who want a small, straightforward application for saving unprotected DVDs as ISO files or burning existing images.

Supported OS: Windows 7/8/10/11.

Price: Free for personal use. Premium and Professional editions add more tools.

In DVD to DVD copying, you will need to copy DVD to a computer in the first place, and then burn the digitize files to a blank DVD. BurnAware is here for the second task. Once you prepared the DVD content in the form of ISO image, VIDEO_TS folder, or merely an MKV file, you can use BurnAware to copy the content into a blank disk. Besides movies and home videos, you can write other kinds of data supported by the disk. In that way, you are using the DVD as a backup method for important files. BurnAware can erase content on an already-used DVD, provided the DVD is rewritable (DVD + /- RW).

Besides being a free DVD burner, it also offers you the option to create Audio CDs, MP3 disk, and Blu-ray disk, free of charge.

Why Choose BurnAware Free:

• Build a new ISO from files and folders on the computer.
• Write an existing disc image to CD, DVD, or Blu-ray media.
• Create a video DVD from properly prepared source files.
• Check whether written data can be read correctly from the completed disc.
• BurnAware remains more lightweight than many all-in-one media suites.

Where it falls short: BurnAware Free does not convert DVDs to MP4 or MKV, remove copy protection, or provide direct disc-to-disc copying. The free edition is also offered as a 32-bit build, while 64-bit versions are associated with the paid editions.

Verdict: BurnAware Free is a useful lightweight option when your goal is to create or burn an ISO image. It is not a replacement for a DVD ripper or protected-disc backup tool.

5. WinX DVD Copy Pro – Best for DVD Cloning on Windows

Best for: Windows users who want traditional DVD-to-DVD, DVD-to-ISO, or DVD-to-VIDEO_TS copying.

Supported OS: Windows 7/8/8.1/10/11.

Price: Paid software with a limited trial.

WinX DVD Copy Pro is one of the most popular DVD copy software on the market. It supports DVD clone, DVD to MPEG 2, VIDEO_TS folder, ISO file, and disc-to-disc copy. One feature that sets it apart from its competitors is the ISO mounter, which allows you to mount the ISO image to a virtual drive, which performs in the same way you play the DVD on a DVD player, only that you are watching the DVD digitally on a computer, with all the content and menu preserved. If you use a remote controller to navigate through the menu of the DVD, now you can use mouse clicks on the mounted ISO. You can also extract video or audio streams flexibly.

Once you insert the disc into the DVD driver, you can select how many sectors to read per time. For copy restriction discs, you can tick the box to remove region code, CSS, UCPS, or Disney's Fake. The program allows you to copy 15 minutes of the content for free.

Why Choose WinX DVD Copy Pro:

• Create another playable disc when you have a compatible burner and blank media.
• Save the DVD as a single disc-image file that can be mounted or burned later.
• Copy the DVD file structure to a folder on the computer.
• Copy selected chapters or extract the original video or audio stream.
• Burn a prepared ISO image or DVD folder to blank media.

Where it falls short: It is available only for Windows and is much less flexible when you need MP4, HEVC, AV1, mobile-device presets, or extensive video editing. The trial is also limited, so it should not be presented as completely free software.

Verdict: WinX DVD Copy Pro is a good fit when "copying a DVD" means preserving the disc as another DVD, ISO image, or VIDEO_TS folder. Choose another tool when your main goal is compression or modern format conversion.

6. DVDFab HD Decrypter – Best Free Option for Older Protected Discs

Best for: Users who need a free but limited tool for copying or converting older DVD and Blu-ray releases.

Supported OS: Windows and macOS.

Price: Free, with restricted copy modes, conversion profiles, and protection support.

DVDFab Free HD Decrypter is the free and feature-limited version of DVDFab DVD Copy software. The main difference lies in the ability to remove copy protections. Free HD Decrypter struggles with newer copy protection technologies, and can only handle DVDs protected with old schemes.

It offers two modes to copy DVD: full disc and main movie. However, you cannot copy DVD 9 to two pieces of DVD5 discs, as the free version isn't baked with a splitting feature. You can use this freeware to digitize DVD to MKV or MP4, but note that if the DVD contains multiple VTS protections, or if the DVD is a Blu-ray issued before 2018, this decrypter will fail you.

Why Choose DVDFab HD Decrypter:

• Keep the complete supported disc or focus on the primary movie.
• Work with both standard-definition DVDs and certain older Blu-ray releases.
• Use a limited collection of backup modes and output profiles.
• Navigate the available copy, rip, and task-queue modules through one application.

Where it falls short: The word "free" needs context. Newer protections, additional copy modes, more conversion profiles, compression options, and other advanced features may require a paid module. The full DVDFab interface also contains frequent upgrade prompts and tools that are not part of HD Decrypter.

Verdict: DVDFab HD Decrypter is worth trying when a free transcoder cannot read an older commercial disc. Check the exact free-mode limitation before starting a large collection.

7. ImgBurn - Best Legacy Tool for ISO Images

Best for: Experienced Windows users who need detailed control over reading, building, writing, and verifying disc images.

Supported OS: Windows. The official site lists support through Windows 10; Windows 11 compatibility is not formally documented.

Price: Free.

ImgBurn is a handy free DVD copy and burning tool when physical media was king. It supports major brands of the DVD blank disk and can help you copy an image file to a disk. No matter you have ISO, DVD, CCD, DI, NDS, NRG, or PDI, you can easily write it to a physical disk. VIDEO_TS folder and BDAV / BDMV folder are also supported to write content into DVD and Blu-ray disks. ImgBurn also works the other way around: you can create an ISO image from the DVD. You can choose a mode from the home screen, start digitalizing or burning a DVD. For a new task, you can press Ctrl+shift+P to go back to this Easy Mode Picker (home screen).

Why People Still Use ImgBurn:

• Work with ISO, BIN, CUE, IMG, MDS, NRG, and several other disc-image formats.
• Save an unprotected disc as an image file.
• Build an ISO or other supported image from local folders.
• Check readability and compare the written disc against an image.
• Access options intended for users familiar with optical drives, media, and layer breaks.

The main reason ImgBurn ranks below newer alternatives is its age. The current official release is still version 2.5.8.0, published on June 16, 2013.

Where it falls short: ImgBurn cannot convert a DVD to MP4 or MKV, select individual movie titles, compress video, or natively process protected discs. Its interface, documentation, and installer ecosystem also feel dated on a modern computer.

Verdict: ImgBurn remains useful for advanced image creation and burning, but most users will be better served by Ashampoo Burning Studio Free or BurnAware on a current Windows PC.

8. WonderFox Free DVD Ripper Speedy – Best Free DVD-to-MPG Converter

Best for: Windows users who want to save a complete DVD as an MPG video without a watermark or time limit.

Supported OS: Windows 7/8/8.1/10/11.

Price: Free.

If you are looking for DVD copy software to transfer content from DVD to hard disc drive, WonderFox provides an easy solution. It assists you to convert DVDs into digital formats such as MP4, MKV, and AVI. The free version allows you to rip no more than 15 minutes for each movie, and you can choose between PAL and NTFS modes for movies from different regions.

For users with the upgraded license, you can batch copy movies in 1:1 quality, provided that your driver supports multiple discs. Another nice feature is the editing kit, with which you can add effects to the video, or rotate sideways video after copying from DVDs. One thing to notice is, during our test, it takes a considerable amount of computational resources, which might affect how your machine performs. You can turn off other programs while using WonderFox.

Why Choose WonderFox Free DVD Ripper Speedy:

• Convert a full DVD rather than a short trial segment.
• Load a physical DVD, ISO image, or VIDEO_TS folder.
• Let the software identify the likely movie or episodic titles.
• Keep, add, remove, or burn supported subtitle tracks.
• Cut, crop, rotate, and change several video parameters.
• The free MPG output is not marked with a product logo.

Where it falls short: MPG files are widely playable but less storage-efficient than modern H.264, HEVC, or AV1 files. Users who need MP4, MKV, mobile presets, or broader format control must upgrade or use another converter.

Verdict: WonderFox Free DVD Ripper Speedy is worth considering when you need a no-cost, full-length DVD-to-MPG backup on Windows and do not require modern output formats.

9. DVD-Cloner XR – Best Paid Disc-to-Disc Copy Suite

Best for: DVD collectors who want multiple disc-copying modes, including complete, movie-only, split, customized, and disc-to-disc copies.

Supported OS: Windows 7/10/11 and Vista. A separate DVD-Cloner XR edition is available for macOS.

Price: Paid software with a seven-day full-feature trial.

DVD Cloner has been around for nearly two decades, and it is a reliable DVD copying software on the market. Beginner or Pro, you shall find DVD Cloner satisfy your requirement in a high-quality way. There are an Express mode and an Expert mode to choose from. For general tasks such as copy everything from DVD to another empty disc, the Express mode serves you well. If you have two DVD drives, the copying process will be done automatically. Alternatively, you can create MKV from DVD in 1-click. The Expert Mode allows more customizability. You can select titles to copy, and leave out all the redundancies.

An interesting feature you can avail of DVD Cloner is its ability to combine multiple DVDs into one, be it Blu-ray (BD-R/RE) or dual-layer DVD (DVD±R9).

The free version only allows you to copy one DVD for free, so that you can check how the software performs before upgrading to the premium version.

Why Choose DVD-Cloner XR:

• Preserve the full movie structure and supported extras.
• Leave out menus or bonus content when only the main feature is needed.
• Choose titles, audio tracks, subtitles, and other content.
• Divide large content or combine multiple sources, depending on the selected mode and media.
• Copy content back to compatible blank DVD media.
• Choose between guided copying and more detailed control.

Where it falls short: It is one of the more expensive options in this guide and includes more disc-related functions than occasional users are likely to need. The Windows and Mac editions are also separate, and the broader Blu-ray, UHD, burning, ripping, and AI features can make the product lineup confusing.

Verdict: DVD-Cloner XR makes the most sense for serious physical-media collectors who regularly copy or burn discs. It is difficult to justify for someone who only needs to digitize one or two DVDs.

FAQs

Can Windows 10 Copy a DVD?

Windows 10 can finish part of the task in copying a DVD. The DVD copying is a cover term for several operations. If you are expecting DVD to blank DVD copy, then you need to use DVD copy software listed above to pull content out, store them on a Windows computer (in a format of ISO or VIDEO_TS folder), and then use Window File Explorer or Windows Media Player to burn the files to a blank DVD.

What is the Most Used Free DVD Copying Software?

HandBrake, ImgBurn, and DVDShrink have been around for a long time and have accumulated many users along the way. However, ImgBurn and DVDShrink are obsolete and haven't been updated for many years. HandBrake is more of a converter that has been repurposed to rip DVD into MP4. For advanced features, you can check other copiers listed above.

Disclaimer: We do not advocate copying authorized or protected DVDs for commercial use.