HD DVD's

Wow i havent been on here in ages
i was wondering my friend has spent a crazy amount on a new PC with a HD-DVD drive and i was wondering he has a couple of HD-DVD and i was wondering if he ripped one of them for me to watch on my laptop would i be able to without having a HD-DVD drive - i would only watch once just to see what the quality is like before deciding if i should get a HD-DVD or a BlueRay drive for my new laptop

 

Not sure about playing it on your laptop quality, legality (ripping it), but bluray is the way to go as HD DVD bombed out and lost the battle against bluray.

 

aint as if he is going to be giving me all his dvds and everything all i want to do is just to test to see how well it looks on my laptop.

 

The quality is good - but ripping it will be **** tough. I can't even take a screen shot of a high def title on my HTPC - Blu-Ray or HD DVD - without jumping through tons of hoops. If your friend can output to an lcd monitor do that - then decide. It won't look drastically different from an lcd monitor to a laptop screen.

 

Without any BS, the answer is yes, you can. Just like you can watch a rip of DVD on your laptop, even if you don't have a DVD drive.

 

As for the HD-DVD or Blu Ray, as someone else pointed out, HD-DVD is dead, so Blu Ray is the only format available anymore for your High Definition disk needs

 

HD DVD is still somewhat worth having - I can buy HD DVD titles for $10 - cheaper than their DVD alternatives. The cheap cost of HD DVDs has more than paid for buying a HD DVD/Blu Ray drive over a standard Blu Ray drive.

 

Yeah, but the movies available now are the only ones you'll be able to get because HD DVD Disks are no longer being produced.

 

idk, i still think HDdvd has its merrits...
im getting a HDdvd player for my 360 for $20 new... less than a standard dvd!

and the HDdvds off amazon are usually always under $20

 

I think there's nothing wrong with HD DVD as a format, just like there was nothing wrong with BetaMax, but the format did lose the war, so whatever you buy now will be all you can get, In 10 years it'll all be found in thrift stores and whatever version of eBay exists.

In all honesty, as High Speed internet gets faster and more widely available, some tech experts are expecting the same from Blu Ray. As a matter of fact, Blu Ray sales have continually dissappointed, even after it killed off HD DVD.

Sorry to go so off topic in this thread, OP.

 

Ive been using mkv files, and then converting them to .vob(dvd) files, so they are playable on my PS3, dvd players, etc, have a 720p quality, and only take up one dual layer dvd, about 8 gb.

 

i knoz wht jou did thar!!11

 

LoL What'd I do?

 

right thanx for all the help - if my he was able to rip the film correctly would i need any special software to watch it?

 

vlc player is what I use

 

great thanx i will have a look at it

 

I don't know how it works with HD-DVD, but I did share my DVD drive over a network before to share games at a LAN. Might be a way to check out HD-DVDs on a notebook.

 

I use Ripbot264 to backup my HD-DVD and Blu-Ray discs to MKV files and store them on my 2nd HDD, its updated very frequently to fix bugs. With the correct settings you can get some really good 1080P encodes in the size of a single DVD disc. The program is freeware but needs a few support programs all but one of which are free. The non free one is AnyDVD HD which I could really not live without and is used to allow RipBot264 to get access to the HD-DVD correctly.

I have a large number of HD-DVD discs (they were cheap, what can I say) and purchased an external box to house my LG HD-DVD/Blu-Ray drive so I can connect it to my laptop, that way I can have the best of both worlds.