Thought I'd re-post a comment from the GOTD download page as a reminder to WR as he wants to backup some discs [I *think* I've talked about this before], & in a separate thread in case anyone else is interested...
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Just general info that folks may/may not find useful, there's a speed limit, a sort of speed governor built into the firmware of many [most?] DVD drives that kicks in when it detects a video DVD. What that means is that you can have a 4X drive or a 20X, and both will only read a video DVD disc at the same, slow speed -- just fast enough to play the movie.
One cure is MediaCodeSpeedEdit [ http://ala42.cdfreaks.com/MCSE/ ]. There's a lot of discussion & info over in the club.myce.com forums [they're linked on the app's home page - the ala42 url] including lists of drives it works with & often more specifics tailored for different drives. What it does in a nutshell is modify [there are several options] a copy of the software you use to flash a drive's firmware. Important Note: flashing the firmware of a DVD or Blu-Ray drive may brick the drive -- it usually doesn't, but every drive manufacturer will give you that warning on their firmware download pages.
At any rate copying data off a DVD or Blu-Ray disc is normally not software dependent -- something like DVDFab might bypass the DRM etc., but the amount of time it takes to copy that data depends on the read speed of your optical drive & write speed of your hard drive, barring any interference from stuff like AV software. SO if you're bothered by your drive's artificially slow speed, or want to do something like change the way your drive handles a specific brand of disc, check out MediaCodeSpeedEdit along with info on using it with your particular drive.