Recording from DVD to the Hard Drive

[AFM]

I am having a mental block how do you record a DVD to the hard drive on the computer.
Now make it simple as there are some morons out here in the real world when it comes to computers.

Tony

[wbrooks]

I use DVDFAB HD Decrypter (http://www.dvdfab.com/free.htm)

[Wood_Junkie]

I like "DVD Shrink". It also will compress things enough to fit on a standard DVD+/R disc. But it also happily dump it to your hard drive, uncompressed if you want.

If you just want a particular track / scene then "DVD Ripper" can do that (e.g. just extract your favorite scenes).

As an aside, playing movies from your hard drive is FAR more battery efficient then using the CD/DVD drive of a laptop.
When I travel for work, I usually put 3-4 movies on the HDD and can watch 1 or 2 on a single battery charge. Using the optical drive I can barely finish on movie. The optical drive motors just take so much juice. The HDD is always spinning anyway, reading from it requires only a little more energy.

[darius]

oops, I made a redundant post about DVDShrink

[AFM]

Thanks for your advice but I didn`t realize you needed a third party program to record a DVD to the hard drive.

Tony

[darius]

Thanks for your advice but I didn`t realize you needed a third party program to record a DVD to the hard drive.

Tony
You don't need to any special software per se to record to the hdd. It's juts a copy/paste operation. Some media though, contain anti-piracy functionality and that's when the usual file operations may fail.

Also, using one of the above titles allows you to compress the video by lowering it's quality, but still keeping is several times better than studio recorded vhs tape.

[Velosapien]

Thanks for your advice but I didn`t realize you needed a third party program to record a DVD to the hard drive.

Tony

Well technically there is no difference in how you would copy a dvd to a hard drive compared to say a cd-rom. When it comes to a DVD movie or other protected title then it gets a little more difficult. They are encrypted to keep people from copying and pirating them. In that case you need one of the above mentioned programs to break the encryption and copy it.

[Josh]

if your trying to copy footage off a sewer inspection dvd you can copy the .vob files off the dvd and rename them to .mpg They will be huge but they will be digital video files.