O.K. here goes, I am a newbie ,I have done a search for this but my search-fu is weak and my time is limited so I will post this question and hopefully the pros out there can get me going in the right direction.
In Jan. I am shipping out for a 1 year "vacation" to Afghanistan, I have a extensive collection of DVDs and would like to make copies of them onto an external HD so I can view them on my laptop during my free time. I am running Vista on my new laptop but have not gotten an external HD yet. I don't want all the extras, only the movies themselves.
My questions are-
1.What would be the best programs to get my DVDs onto the Hard Drive? I am not planning to burn onto disk.
2.Who makes a good quality Ext. HD? I have been looking at an Iomega that has a 1TB drive.
3. What would be the best program to watch them on the laptop? Is Windows Media Player acceptable. Realize I am not looking for the ultimate movie experience, just something to watch for a little get away from the work.
I know that's a bunch of questions to ask in one post and I apoligize if I have gotten out of my lane
Once you rip the movies, you can use dvd shrink to compress the movies some to create more space and remove the languages and subtitles you don't want.
Depending on the size you are able to compress the movies, and the number of movies you own, you can use either 1 very large external or several smaller drives. I have a 500GB external, and have nearly 100 movies on there, with still some space left over.
To watch them, widows media player is ok, but you also have vlc which is a very good player. Power dvd is another program you can use.
I'd normally recommend DVD Rebuilder but cavscout6 is short on time and isn't overly fussed with the quality in which case i'd say just use DVD Shrink (after using DVDFab to rip). Shrink will produce adequate quality for just watching the films and won't take anywhere near as long as Rebuilder..
I don't like Windows Media Player as it's bloated but if it's already installed then it should do fine, it wouldn't hurt to install Media Player Classic too as it's really light on resources, plus there's VLC Player too. Obviously it's important to get everything/test everything ahead of time in case you don't have internet access over there, it'd be a shame to have everything in place then find something doesn't work when you're out there.
Thanks for the well wishes and thanks for the advice on DVDfab and the other programs. This will get me started, I haven't downloaded them yet, but I will today as soon as I get some free time! (Not much of that anymore) I will keep you all posted on how it goes. And anymore advice you all can think of is greatly appreciated! Thanks again.
!. dvdfabhddecrypter (free) and choose backup movie only.
2. use free dvdshrink, to shrink the file down to size and save as an ISO.
3. the free VLC player will play your ISO directly when you doubleclick on it.
Thank you all for the help! I have downloaded DVDfab and been using it for the last week. It is a real easy program to use. Very intuitive. I decided against putting all my movies on an external HD in favor of putting them onto dvd-r. My main worry was that if my drive crashed then I would loose all my movies as opposed to just one or two because of disc problems. So, for the last week I have been burning anywhere from 3-5 discs a day. DVDfab is really fast, it seems to take on average about 1 hour per disc, from copy of the disc to the burn of the copy. Again,rtm27,jlg895,creaky,bonzo1 and jony218 Thank you all very much for your help!
Good stuff, glad you like DVDFab.
That's a good point re the hard drive, they're great and everything but they do fail, and one obvious way to make them fail quicker is to cart them around.
Anyways, at least you will now have some movies to watch, just bear in mind that someone doesn't see you carrying that stash of discs as unfortunately there are people out there who don't like those of us who are able to make backups of our discs :)
