External drive for media only

Stuey1980

Hi all. I have been given a media player hard drive, which I am sure I could make good use of. The thing is I am unsure what to do with dvd's in order to back them up to the drive. It's a french make, can't remember the name. I am offshore so I can hardly look right now. I think I have to convert the DVD content to an AVI file? I tried this once but the process took ages and I didn't want to wait around for so long. My machine is not slow so I wanted to check that this is the right thing to do. Other than that I am sure I could sell it to someone who knows what they are doing.

Thanks for any advice,

stu

kwikbreaks

Commercial DVDs are encrypted and extracting non-encrypted video files from them using a decryption program does take a while. If you then want them to them occupy less space (at the expense of some loss in quality) re-encoding them takes an age too. There is also a question of legality as sfaik you are not entitled to copy the original DVD.

bob_a_builder

Try

DVDsmith

Stuey1980

Thanks for the replies. I will try once I am home for a while. I don't see what legality issues there could be, I am only backing up my own collection. Of course not everyone is as mindful as me and so it makes sense to make things difficult for would be knock off Nigel's.

Marty_J

The legality issue concerns circumventing the copy-protection on the DVD, which is illegal.