DVD's to Harddisk for Personal Use Only...

Okay.

When I get my Laptop which ever one of the Toshiba's I go with. I will want to watch the occasional DVD while I am travelling. Since when I travel I go by greyhound, I will want to only pack the bear minimum of stuff. I also understand that watching a video from the Harddrive will conserve battery life. So how can I do this. What program do I need to buy to do this, or will there be one on the computer that will let me do this. I think I may be entering the grey area of legallities by doing this, and I know I will have to have pretty good security settings to prevent that Hacking thing from happening when I am online and someone stealing my files??? so I have read in the newspaper. I am rather dull in the recent techie stuff that people can actually do... but I do know my way around the computer and software quite well when I get my hands on it and figure it out. I would want to make the DVD into a lower format so as to not destroy the quality to much, but make it a bit better storage size as I think they can be around 4 to 5 GB per video. I don't think I would want to "hack" a dvd to put it on my harddrive, but rather use a dvd that would let me copy it there. But if the later should have to happen what would I have to do... since this may be a sensitive subject...

Thanks, CJM

 

I deleted out your email because users have posted their email accounts on here before, and spam bots will get ahold of it.

Considering your intentions, there shouldn't be any problems with this thread staying open.

 

As far as legality - it's a gray area - there's a thread on that here: http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=64071

Thread might give you some things to google for, as I'm not sure how to do what you are asking.

 

If you want to keep the DVD in the original file format you can use DVD Shrink to rip it to your hard drive and then you can use PowerDVD or another DVD program to open it and watch it from there. If you would prefer to have it in an .avi format, you can use a program such as AutoGK to make the DVD into an AVI video so you can watch it using whatever media player that supports that file type. With either method you can pick the compression so you can decide how big the ending files are. You can google either program, both are free.

 

DVD shrink works really well for whay you want to do. It even let you get rid of the DVD content that you dont want so you save space.

 

There are loads of convert DVD to [insert name of codec] on www.videohelp.com