Can DVD movies be copied to a Hard Drive?

I'm considering getting a Dell D420, although I'm not 100% sure yet (I've got a few others in mind, too).

Anyway... the D420 doesn't have a built-in optical drive. The only problem I see here is if our 4 year old son wants to watch one of his DVDs while on a trip... and I'd rather not have the external drive hanging off his car seat, or a plane's seat tray.

Is it possible to copy a DVD to a laptop's hard drive? Or are they "protected" from copying?

This would allow him to watch a movie or two -- which would make the D420 more desirable. If it is possible, any tips or software recommendations would be appreciated.

Thanks!

 

DVD Shrink will let you make backups of most DVDs. You may also want to look into divx encoders / players. There are several free products available and DivX will give smaller files and playback quality which is fine for a notebook display.

John

 

possible... i second dvd shrink...

 

Excellent... thanks, guys!

 

You'll need more than just DVD Shrink for most movies (especially any by Sony). Get RipIt4Me, DVD Decrypter, and DVD Shrink.

 

eek... sounds like it just got more complicated...

 

DVD Decrypter is the best for just copying DVDs without re-encoding. It is free, small, easy and fast .

 

I always use DVD Decrypter. It lets you create an ISO copy of the movie on your hard drive. You only need to find a program (Dameon Tools is great by the way) which will let you create a virtual cd rom drive on your computer. Its not to hard.

Once you have the virtual cd rom drive on your computer you mearely mount the image (ISO) to the virtual drive and its like having a dvd in your player at home.

Good Luck and if you have any questions just let me know.

 

Does this ISO process need to be done each time a DVD is copied? Or is it done just once, period?

Also, are there any "all in one" solutions out there? One piece of software that handles everything?

Thanks!

 

There is no "all-in-one" solution that you are looking for. Likewise they have said above you can the freeware solution items above. Others claim that the mix of applications work with most DVDs.

There is also a purchase solution. I have found that an AnyDVD/CloneDVD2 combination to work quite well on any disc. Even those that are protected by the newer Arccos protections and multiple protections. They do cost money though so if you are looking then you may just want to check them out. There is a 21-day trial so it gives you time to consider it.

On that note. AnyDVD can be used all by itself but CloneDVD2 gives better control. CloneDVD2 on its own won't be able to copy region locked dvds. You may be able to get away with a combination of AnyDVD and DVD Shrink instead so check out that combination if you can afford both programs. Last, but not least, some dvd players can playback files directly from the hard drive and may not require you to mount an image of the dvd. PowerDVD I believe has that functionality. I'm not sure if WinDVD does.

Oh and if you are looking for good image mounters. Daemon Tools mentioned in an earlier post is really good or the Free version of Alcohol 52% will work as well.

 

Trust me... you want AnyDVD. I use it all the time to copy movies to my external USB HDD to for use on my movie server I have hooked up to my Samsung 67" DLP TV. Once installed all you have to do is copy the DVD to your desktop as you would copy any other file... Completely painless and you don't have to jump through all those hoops you have to with other software. They take a LOT of space though... figure 7 Gb per movie.

 

Sounds perfect. I'll check it out. Thanks!

Ouch!

EDIT: hmmm, I just took a quick peek and I see "AnyDVD, AnyDVD HD, CloneDVD and CloneDVD mobile" all offered on the same site. It looks like more than just one program is needed... true? or false?

Again, I want to copy the DVD to my hard drive, not to a blank DVD.

 

As I have said before AnyDVD can be used by itself. It will allow you to copy the dvd files from the drive to your hard drive but it doesn't allow enough control in order to minimize disk space usage. CloneDVD2 cannot be used by itself and is designed to compliment AnyDVD. It will allow you to copy the dvd to your hard drive and if you wish can be stripped down to just the movie which in alot of cases reduces it to 3-4 GB without sacrificing quality. You just lose the extras. They sell all of them but they compliment each other.

CloneDVD mobile encodes the dvd into an avi file or into other formats compatible with handheld devices.

AnyDVD HD enables the HD capable functions built into AnyDVD so you can get a license for the HD parts but it isn't needed. You just won't have access to them.

The only parts you really need to consider is just AnyDVD and CloneDVD2.

Oh and one last thing. AnyDVD can only do a file copy. It doesn't do an iso creation or burn to DVD. CloneDVD2 can do a file copy, create an iso to be mounted (or burned with a 3rd party application), or burned directly to DVD. I personally use the iso option and mount it on a virtual drive.

 

Now comes the question, there is a bit of a learning curve in using these programs, are you ready? How much drive space can you free up, as above, 3.6 to 7+ gigs a title depending if you recode or go mp4,ect. The ripping and encoding time you will spend doing this, average 8 to 60+ minutes depending on how fast your DVD reader and CPU is running. Doom9 is a good site to check out the latests tools and such and ask specific questions.

 

Why not go the really simple route and download the movies from legal movie download sites? No ripping/burning/converting/legal issues. Check out:

http://www.cinemanow.com/
(They even have some free offerings. Check out the free family category at:
http://www.cinemanow.com/Family/1109,0,5,,1,7,0/)

Or Apple's iTunes Movie offerings (for Wind and Mac): http://www.apple.com/itunes/store/movies.html

Nice review of the above (along with several others) at:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/10/15/itunes-movies-v-the-rest/

 

Since I would only need an occasional movie for an occasional trip, this looks like the best bet yet. Thanks, sanpabloguy!

 

Well, I finally decided to download AnyDVD and the accompanying products. It took a little while to figure out how to use this stuff, but once I did I have to admit it was pretty darn easy. So thanks to everyone who recommended AnyDVD. It works.

I do have a couple of questions, though:

1. What "quality" setting do you guys use? It looks like it's on a default setting of 79% right now.

2. The ISO files play just fine from the hard drive (yeah! ) but I wouldn't mind seeing how they look on my Video iPod. I downloaded CloneDVDmobile, but I can't for the life of me figure out how to convert an ISO file into an MPG file. Any tips??

Thanks again!

 

1. The quality meter is an indication of approximately how much of the original detail will be retained. I found that the meter can read all the way down to 50% before I notice any significant loss of detail even on my High-Definition TV. YMMV on that one. You can use the "Clone DVD Titles" instead of the "Clone DVD" option instead and start unckecking the audio and subtitle streams that you don't want/need. This will guarantee a 100% quality duplicate 99% of the time. The cases where that won't happen is where the move is over 2 hours long and even then you probably had to do this route anyways to keep it above 60%. When it hits 100% then transcoding is not required and it skips that part. Rips then builds ISO goes a bit faster. Seen it get done in under 10 minutes. The longest I have seen it run is for around 25 minutes when it had to transcode a dual-layer dvd to a single-layer one.

I have a license for CloneDVDMobile but have not looked into that one. There should be a profile item for a Video iPod and it should just "work". I did a sample encode for a PSP and it worked fine before.

 

For a great free iPod video convertor, go to pspupdates.com and look over the last few pages for a program called, I think, PSPVideo9. It can also do iPod encoding, and does it VERY well.

 

Ahhh, I see.

Yeah, I've been doing that. I'm cutting out everything except for the movie. Rather, I'm only checking the largest file (the obvious movie file).

There is.

Should being the operative word here.

 

I'll take a peek. Thanks.