Is it possible to copy DVD`s to a laptop?

[Aaron]

Hey guys,
I was wondering if it is possible to take a DVD and copy it to a computer? I want to put all my magic DVD`s on my laptop but idk how to, it wont let me just save them like a CD.

Please help

Thanks,
Aaron

[Linguist_]

It is possible, yes. However, it is illegal to do so. Of course, if you are just doing it for private use then no one is really going to notice/care. The reason you are finding it hard is because they encrypt the DVDs to stop people from ripping and burning them. It is bypassing this encryption that is illegal to do, so I'm not going to tell you how to do it. Although, most basic DVD ripping programs available probably allow the option, and I'm sure a search on Google will be lucrative too.

I'm assuming you're in the US where such laws are rather strict. If so, you could argue that even having such software on your computer is illegal. In other countries, it's a much greyer area, and the courts are fine with people doing things for personal use.

EDIT - I just noticed you're in Canada, and I think Canada allows one copy per DVD for personal use, at least at present. There may be legislation coming through to disallow bypassing the encryption. But yes, just search on Google for DVD ripping software and you should be able to work from that.

[Aaron]

I am in Canada, I didn`t know it was illeagal but if I put it on my computer no one will care, I will look up the laws here in canada.

EDIT: From what I found it looks like it is legal to do for a personal back up copy in canada, Does anyone know any safe software to put DVD`s on my computer.

[Kanped]

ratDVD is easy to use but takes a long time. 

Personally, I wouldn't bother ripping the content, though.  I'd make an .ISO (I think ImgBurn does this; everyone with a CD drive should have this software, BTW) file and then use something like DaemonTools to mount it.  Basically, the computer thinks you're reading a DVD from a disc drive but you're actually reading the image of a DVD from your hard drive with a virtual DVD drive. 

[AceGambit]

Making an ISO is probably your best bet.  It will take up more drive space though.  I don't know how big your hard drive is, but ripping a DVD to .iso could run as big as 7 or 8 GB depending on the DVD.  I know you mentioned you're putting these on a laptop.  A lot of the newer laptops come with a 500GB hard drive, but if you have an older one, 250GB fills up pretty quick, especially when you're dicing it 4-8GB at a time.

Hard drive storage is irresponsibly cheap these days, I'd consider just picking up an external hard drive to store them.

[NathanCanadas]

A couple issues you haven't thought about.
1) If a magic trick is on a DVD it means it is too big to fit on a CD, which means it is bigger than 700MB. This means that unless you have a lot of space on your computer or few magic DVDs, chances are you won't be able to fit them all.
To avoid your computer crashing by lack of space, I recommend you right click on your hard drive and click on "get info". A mini menu will appear with tons of info. One line will say "Capacity", another will say "available". Make sure the "available" doesn't go below 5GB because then your computer will be very slow, increase its chances of crashing, and you won't have room for work or music etc.

2) Many computers aren't made to be able to RIP Dvds. Just CDs. So if you can't RIP any of your DVDs, you will know that it is because of your computer.

3) There is this app called "RipDVD" which works wonders. You can figure it out from there

4) I hope this helps. Many of these problems I ran into myself, so I hope this helps.

PS: I rarely use my PC so I only know for sure that this works on Mac. But you should try it, even if you have a PC.

[Kanped]

As far as I can tell, RipDVD is Mac-only.  RatDVD will do the same thing, saving it in a proprietary format. 

Having less than 5GB space won't necessarily do any harm to your experience (my first PC had much less space than that, total). It depends on how much space you've allocated fro your virtual memory paging file and how many programs you have running.  Obviously, the more space the better but if, for example, your hard drive is partitioned, you can leave very little space on the partition with the OS on it without any ill effects at all.

If you can read DVDs, you can rip DVDs; it's a software process, not hardware.  I think you mean that you can't BURN DVDs on any machine but most of them will let you do this.

[AceGambit]

For fear of diving into a discussion on virtual memory and the multitude of ways one can manage to crash Windows on a playing card forum, I'm going to go ahead and say for the most part, Kanped is right.

Aaron, do you have an Apple Mac or a Microsoft Windows PC?  How much experience with computers do you have?  Do you know how to locate your hard drive space? Do you plan on backing up your videos onto your laptop so that you can watch them without having to have the DVD with you?  or is this more of an 'In case I ruin the DVD?

[NathanCanadas]

@Kanped and AceGambit - Thx for clearing that up. I'm kinda tired so my brain isn't functionning right
@Aaron just don't forget that you can't go over the limit of space available in your computer, so I recommend you constantly take a look at that!

[Kanped]

If you wanted to get really fancy, you could store it on an external drive or even an internal drive on another machine and network that drive so that it can be accessed from anywhere on the local network and stream it to your laptop.  That may be a little excessive for a couple of DVDs, but it means you don't need to have the external drive plugged into your laptop to watch your stuff.

[Don Boyer]

If all you want is the video and not the DVD menus and such, HandBrake is available from handbrake.fr for Mac and PC.  It rips the video into a compressed .mp4 file (and a few other formats).  30 minutes of video compressed into about a third of a gigabyte, and a 2-hour movie is about 1.3 Gb.  The video is viewable on iPads and iPod touches as well.  For a PC, you'd need to watch an MP4 in QuickTime, I think.  It's super-easy and you can also capture subtitles, alternate soundtracks, etc.

[NathanCanadas]

If you wanted to get really fancy, you could store it on an external drive or even an internal drive on another machine and network that drive so that it can be accessed from anywhere on the local network and stream it to your laptop.  That may be a little excessive for a couple of DVDs, but it means you don't need to have the external drive plugged into your laptop to watch your stuff.

That's what I had to do at one point in order to listen to my music when I had a computer with very small memory. Or you can just back all your info on a hard drive and remove that from your computer and when you need to access it, access it from the hard drive.

[Kanped]

If all you want is the video and not the DVD menus and such, HandBrake is available from handbrake.fr for Mac and PC.  It rips the video into a compressed .mp4 file (and a few other formats).  30 minutes of video compressed into about a third of a gigabyte, and a 2-hour movie is about 1.3 Gb.  The video is viewable on iPads and iPod touches as well.  For a PC, you'd need to watch an MP4 in QuickTime, I think.  It's super-easy and you can also capture subtitles, alternate soundtracks, etc.

You don't need Quicktime (it's not well optimized on PC and I think it forces you to download Itunes with it).  Personally, I like VLC media player (also cross-platform, great software) but there's a bunch of media players that will do it.  Honestly, I'd be surprised if Windows Media Player doesn't do it.

[xela]

Don't most DVDs now come with a digital copy for computer use now?

[NathanCanadas]

Don't most DVDs now come with a digital copy for computer use now?

Yes, but he
1) Probably wants to copy his old DVDs.
2) Maybe wants both the DVD copy and the digital copy.

[Don Boyer]

Don't most DVDs now come with a digital copy for computer use now?

Sort of.  You buy the Blu-ray disc, you get the DVD and usually a digital copy or an UltraViolet copy.  Haven't figured out how UV works, never bought one of those yet.  The digital copy is often an iTunes download when it isn't UV.


Most MAGIC DVDs don't come with digital copies - if they exist, you have to buy them separately.  Haven't seen any magic Blu-rays yet...  Have you?

[Paul Carpenter]

Just get Handbrake and be done with it. It's taken card of almost everything Ive thrown at it for years (hundreds upon hundreds) and you can tune it to output a size/quality that works for you. I have every movie I own on a drive and watch through my apple tv. Can't beat it.

[Don Boyer]

Just get Handbrake and be done with it. It's taken card of almost everything Ive thrown at it for years (hundreds upon hundreds) and you can tune it to output a size/quality that works for you. I have every movie I own on a drive and watch through my apple tv. Can't beat it.

I have a similar rig, but I have an old Mac mini functioning as a "media server" to the home theater system, with two one-terabyte drives functioning as a redundant 1-terabyte array.  I may switch that to having an active drive and a backup drive, though - if an error gets written to one drive in the array, it gets written to BOTH drives.  What are your thoughts?

Handbrake is really great.  You can even alter settings to include subtitles, or, when copying anime with the English soundtrack, only the "forced" subtitles that appear to translate the occasional printed Japanese signs, newspapers, etc.  And it's practically too easy to use.

[Aaron]

I have a PC running windows 7, I will try some of the ideas above, I have a 281GB harddrive so I will use a External harddrive.
Thanks everyone.

[NathanCanadas]

I have a PC running windows 7, I will try some of the ideas above, I have a 281GB harddrive so I will use a External harddrive.
Thanks everyone.

If you have 281GB, that is ample space for dozens of DVDs! No need for an External drive in that case!

[Kanped]

If you have 281GB, that is ample space for dozens of DVDs! No need for an External drive in that case!

281GB drive does not mean 281GB of free space!  That's a really small drive, definitely use an external one.

[NathanCanadas]

If you have 281GB, that is ample space for dozens of DVDs! No need for an External drive in that case!

281GB drive does not mean 281GB of free space!  That's a really small drive, definitely use an external one.

How much free space do you have Aaron? Because I have a 110GB drive and 10GB of free space, and that is definitely enough for 2 or 3 DVDs.

[Paul Carpenter]

Just get Handbrake and be done with it. It's taken card of almost everything Ive thrown at it for years (hundreds upon hundreds) and you can tune it to output a size/quality that works for you. I have every movie I own on a drive and watch through my apple tv. Can't beat it.

I have a similar rig, but I have an old Mac mini functioning as a "media server" to the home theater system, with two one-terabyte drives functioning as a redundant 1-terabyte array.  I may switch that to having an active drive and a backup drive, though - if an error gets written to one drive in the array, it gets written to BOTH drives.  What are your thoughts?

Handbrake is really great.  You can even alter settings to include subtitles, or, when copying anime with the English soundtrack, only the "forced" subtitles that appear to translate the occasional printed Japanese signs, newspapers, etc.  And it's practically too easy to use.

I've always thought that RAID *sounded* awesome but never put one into practice for reasons like that. I think that having a large drive requires a backup, so whether you do that manually or through Time Machineor some other app is up to you. I generally just batch copy some movies periodically, as none of that content is so critical that I need instant/constant backup. They are just movies, you can always get them again.

[AceGambit]

I always chuckle at the people who RAID their home machines.  It hardly seems worth the money to me.  Carbonite accounts aren't that expensive, there are a million other free solutions out there for backing up your data.  Hell if you want, just buy webhosting with unlimited space and dump your files onto a website via FTP every now and then.  I've really never seen the need to use RAID outside of a commercial setting.

[Don Boyer]

Just get Handbrake and be done with it. It's taken card of almost everything Ive thrown at it for years (hundreds upon hundreds) and you can tune it to output a size/quality that works for you. I have every movie I own on a drive and watch through my apple tv. Can't beat it.

I have a similar rig, but I have an old Mac mini functioning as a "media server" to the home theater system, with two one-terabyte drives functioning as a redundant 1-terabyte array.  I may switch that to having an active drive and a backup drive, though - if an error gets written to one drive in the array, it gets written to BOTH drives.  What are your thoughts?

Handbrake is really great.  You can even alter settings to include subtitles, or, when copying anime with the English soundtrack, only the "forced" subtitles that appear to translate the occasional printed Japanese signs, newspapers, etc.  And it's practically too easy to use.

I've always thought that RAID *sounded* awesome but never put one into practice for reasons like that. I think that having a large drive requires a backup, so whether you do that manually or through Time Machineor some other app is up to you. I generally just batch copy some movies periodically, as none of that content is so critical that I need instant/constant backup. They are just movies, you can always get them again.

There's two ways to use RAID; my redundant drive setup and creating a virtual drive equal in size to the two separate drives alone.  Don't see why I'd want to do the latter, really, unless I was dealing with some truly massive files.

Can Time Machine be used to back up one external drive to another?  I've only been able to get it to back up the computer's internal drive to either a hard-connected drive or a network-accessible drive.

I always chuckle at the people who RAID their home machines.  It hardly seems worth the money to me.  Carbonite accounts aren't that expensive, there are a million other free solutions out there for backing up your data.  Hell if you want, just buy webhosting with unlimited space and dump your files onto a website via FTP every now and then.  I've really never seen the need to use RAID outside of a commercial setting.

I just liked the idea that if one drive had a physical failure, the other would keep chugging along as if nothing happened.

I've got about a half-terabyte of data stored right now.  I can't imagine there's a free solution useful for handling that much data.  Factor in that my home Internet, while free, works more at DSL speeds than real broadband, and you can see that anything web-based for massive storage becomes a real trick.