DVD -> HDD, possible?

And no, not because I want to copy them...why'd I want to copy DVD's I already own?

Basic reasons for wanting to do this are twofold:

1. The DVD ROM drive in my computer makes as much noise when playing back a movie as a small aircraft taking off - which is just plain ANNOYING.

2. Occsionally - just occasionally, it'd be nice to watch a movie on the laptop too, which doesn't have a DVD ROM drive. I realise I'd need to reduce the quality a few zillion times, but we're only talking about having it playing back in a box in the corner of the screen when I'm working anyway! This isn't a 42" plasma screen TV we're talking about.

It's probably a silly question, and a quick Google search would have probably yielded the answer - but search engines have been consistently annoying me lately, so I figured I'd actually ask people who will know the answers before wasting a whole evening looking for stuff.

All I need is something to convert the DVD into a useable file (AVI/MPEG - heck, even a VCD would do, the CD drive's quiet)...and I'm sure something out there does exist to do this. Just not something I've ever investigated before.

In this day where the PC is becoming a Media Centre - it seems logical to me that there would be something out there which can remove the part of watching movies on it, which in my case means balancing on top of a revolving chair to try to reach the top shelf of the bookcase where the DVD's are kept!...when there's much, much harddrive space could be used for that...

i do it all the time with legal dvd,s lol i just rip em to my hardrive then reencode em to xvid i can then put a dvd on a cd to save money

PSSST!! DVD Decrypter 3.5.2.0 /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/rolleye11.gif Or AutoGK for an all in one package. /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif

check out doom9.net pay attention to the GordianKnot software.

there are at least two ways:

1) to store them on your computer with mpeg2 quality(basically the same quality as your dvd), use dvdshrink and back up the files into your computer. You can play them back with your dvd player. I used PowerDVD and I use the file mode option. If you want to burn it to a dvd+-r later, you can use nero.

2) To store them as an avi using the divx 4/5/6 or xvid format, use XMPEG or FlashMPEG. Those two programs will convert the mpeg2 dvd into avi. The whole process takes about 2 hours on a AMD Athlon XP 2000+ . You can use media player to play them back, but you'll need the appropriate codec.

Thanks for the quick replies.

Will look into them tomorrow, not really worried about being able to copy into any form really, I don't have a DVD burner, and anything being moved to the laptop will be getting done via network. And the files ain't going anywhere other than there anyway. Still, nice to know the options might be there should I ever need them.

Would be handy to know how far I can shrink things down without needing too fancy codecs to view, as the laptop isn't the greatest of things (P166), but I know it can deal with video playback from a recording from my TV card or camera at an acceptable quality. (though my TV card now don't work. Thanks Windows XP for not having drivers...grrr).

Converting things hardware-wise shouldn't be too much of a problem, the main PC's a 2.6Ghz P4, so should be able to cope, provided all the bleeping junk which has accumulated in there decides to let me have any memory to work with anyway...

Thanks for the help!

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Tree said:
PSSST!! DVD Decrypter 3.5.2.0 /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/rolleye11.gif Or AutoGK for an all in one package. /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif

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[ QUOTE ]
modamag said:
check out doom9.net pay attention to the GordianKnot software.

[/ QUOTE ]

Great minds think alike! /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif

i can genely put a dvd in 400 megs

Then you could fit two movies onto a single 1gb thumbdrive. Imagine watching a movie on an airplane using no moving parts to drain the battery. /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/cool.gif

It's relatively trivial to extract the raw DVD data onto a harddrive then just use some trickery to convince your DVD software that the VOB file you extracted is a DVD.

Or so I've heard.

Encoding a DVD to MPEG4 or some other .avi video file is time-consuming - usually several hours on most PCs.

Don't forget DVD shrink.

http://dvdshrink.info/
http://dvdshrink.org/what.html

Zealandeth, I don't think you can play a DVD or divx movie on a P166 machine very well without having a good hardware decoder graphics card. It is a lot more different and more CPU/graphic intensive then a little say 340x280 avi file. A DVD is what 740x480 or thereabouts? I'm trying to think back from experience but it seems I had trouble with even my PII-300 at the time although I think once you get in the range of PIII-500 or so and up, you usually don't have any problems. As I recall, I think the ATI video chipsets were ahead of the game as far as offering hardware mpeg decoding help.

ATI is great, but their driver upgrades suck.. /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/frown.gif