As I have and external dvd/cd player for my laptop-I would like Copy a dvd movie to hard disk and then play it from there. So what do I do and what software do I need.
Well if you set smart ripper to rip to just one vob file instead of 6 or 7 you can watch it in WinDVD!
If u use DVD Shrink 2.3 <--(download) This'll save space cos you can strip everything not needed in the rip & compression process...
i use a combination of SmartRipper, DVD2AVI, and TMPGEnc to backup my DVD's to MPEG. here's a link to a guide you can use http://www.afterdawn.com/articles/archive/dvd2vcd_with_smart_dvd2avi_tmpgenc.cfm
jznelly, Excuse my ignorance, but why on earth would you want to spend about 4 hours in re-encoding to watch a movie in quality lower than the original? I believe Prism only wants to copy it to the laptop so he does not need to carry around the external drive. I am sure once he watched the movie once or twice he will delete the 4+GB or less to free up space for a new movie.
?? I hope to better the picture quality (PQ) by NOT playing the dvd from my internal PC dvdrom but from its (lossless quality ) copy to hdd !! So I wonder what Anosis means? kyrill
Dear Kyrill, Prism got a notebook computer with an external DVD drive only. On the road that would be very cumbersome to play movies with a big 5.25" drive attached to the NB. So he rather wants to play the movie directly from HD. Now jznelly suggested to use re-encoding software, which will save a lot of space on the HD, but it takes approx. 4 to 5 hours form decoding to re-encoding until you got a playable MPEG and the quality of the MPEG is usually far less then DVD.
Okay I have copied the dvd to my hard disk-now how do I persuade Intervideo windvd to look at the files rather than giving me the error 'can't find any cdrom/dvdrom device' total newbie at this.
Prism, Another way is to go to the directory where you decrypted the .IFO, .VOB files to and double click on the first .IFO file. Usually WinDVD is already the assigned software to run the .ifo ending, otherwise it will ask you to chose a progam to open the file.
jznelly was just making a suggestion that if you would like to have a few movies on your hard disk, you can encode it as an mpeg to save space. If you want to keep the same quality, use dvd decrypter and choose the largest file...or if you would like to keep all the options, select the whole movie. When it is done ripping, open windvd or whatever you use (what i do is i use ifoedit to open up the file and then it'll use your windvd to play it). And make sure you open the first vts file i think its video_ts or something like that.
