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Devis in Burlingame, California asked: "I have a car that will play DVD when you're stopped. But the DVD player will only play regular DVD, not Blu-Ray. Is there a way to take a Blu-Ray disc and "downgrade" it so it will play in regular DVD players like you find in cars?"

 

Devis, you won’t be able to downgrade the Blu-Ray disc itself, it’s physically different from the DVD.

DVD’s use a 650 nanometer laser, Blu-Ray uses a 405 nanometer laser (a ray of that frequency looks blue to the human eye, hence the terrible name). The difference in frequencies allows Blu-Ray discs to use much smaller holes to encode their information, allowing for a far larger capacity.

What you can do is rip the media off the Blu-Ray disc using a computer with a Blu-Ray drive, re-encode it and save it onto a DVD that you car can read. There’s software that can do that, and you should be able to find the instructions fairly easily online, but we can’t really give you too much information about that because it’s technically illegal.

You bought a more expensive Blu-Ray that you want to degrade to a lesser quality DVD for your own use, but according to the DMCA, you can’t legally do it, so we have to stop short of telling you how, just know that it is possible.

 

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