Copy DVD Movie to portable Hard Drive

RuthnJasper

Of course... not that I am whiter than white ... but we wouldn't be talking about what's technically video piracy here, would we?

As much as I fancy Captain Jack Sparrow, he IS a bit of a naughty boy...

KillerWatt

vicx wrote: »

To convert the video_ts files back to AVI on this program I have downloaded would take too much time. I have started to convert one and it's going to take around 2 hours! Is there a quicker way to convert the files back to AVI?

Buy a faster PC, I do a 2 hour DVD to Xvid in 27 minutes on an i5 notebook.

paddyrg

Blimey what a mix of info you have here. Some bits more useful than others!

Ok, there is a reason why copying DVD's is difficult - it was designed to be. The idea was to stop piracy, and whilst that has failed, the issue still remains that *you must pay for your films*. Ok, that bit over

DVD's contain the movies plus menues, extras, etc chunked up into a string of VOB files, with a few other metadata files (NFO, etc) for good measure. All you need is the right VOB files. Use DVDDecrypter (free, but take care where you download it from) to extract the VOB files to disk, or if you have another tool, use that. It will also help you work out *which* VOB files you use (the movie is probably in chunks, several files, as VOB files have a maximum filesize). Once you have them on disk, you can then fool most computers/systems into playing them by renaming the files from xxxxxx.VOB to x1.MP2 or x1.MPG - as noted by someone, VOB files are MPEG2 encodes. If it works for you, this is a very fast and powerful way to watch the films from hard drive, although you will need to look for successive files when one ends (the VOB files haves sequential names for the main movie and are pretty obvious when you get used to spotting them)

There are other free tools out there that will transcode the video straight from the DVD to your chosen format - this takes processing power by the bucketload, which is why it is slow. It can easily be 2+ hours depending on the quality you need and codecs you choose, and how small you want the finished file. DVD's have *already* been highly compressed to fit a movie on a slice of plastic, so if you change formats you will typically lose either quality or disk space or time doiing so. What format to encode into? Not AVI which is a decent container format but doesn't support the newer, more compact codecs. WMV is a good choice if you are sticking with Windows machines - it is a container and codec in one specification, and keeps things simple, and gives pretty great performance. If you choose MOV or MPG, you are just choosing the colour of bucket the data is stored in, then you need to decide on the codec (COmpression and DECompression algorithm) to use. The MPEG4v10 based ones are good, x264 is free, although MainConcept H.264 gives better results... but we are walking into a very confusing area, which is why I suggest WMV as a simple and 'good enough' answer. Anyone who believes encoding video codec choices is simple does not know enough about the subject - there are many licensing issues, compatibility issues, etc to be aware of!

The third answer, which many will accuse of being dumb but bear with me, is to play the DVD from a player, and use a capture card on your PC to save it to disk. There is a small amount of generational loss from going via analogue, it is true, but the process is done in real time, gives one file, and makes all the decisions for you. The player does the MPEG2 decryption, the capture card does all the MPEG4 encoding, and probably has a simple interface for beginners use as well. All you have to do is hook up the yellow, red and white outputs from the DVD player to the same coloured inputs on the capture card with a short cable - easy. You can even get USB capture cards for £20 or so. This technique is very commonly used in industry, by the way, but with better capture cards and cabling.

eyeinthesky

It reads like you are trying to convert the video ts folders that you have copied to your pc, this is not the way to achieve what you want. You need to put the dvd in your drive and then rip from that. I would expect it to take around 20 to 40 minutes.

George_Michael

but we wouldn't be talking about what's technically video piracy here, would we?

Technically yes, but in reality it's a crime that happens millions (if not billions) of times each year in the UK, and according to the latest news reports, will shortly be made legal here to bring the UK into line with pretty much the rest of the world.
It's referred to as "format shifting" and is the same as when you copy a CD on to your MP3 player or computer (also still illegal in the UK), and although illegal, I don't think anyone has actually been prosecuted for this crime.

It would be a different matter if the OP wanted to copy a DVD with the intention of selling it on. Now that may well end up with a prosecution.

KillerWatt

eyeinthesky wrote: »

It reads like you are trying to convert the video ts folders that you have copied to your pc, this is not the way to achieve what you want. You need to put the dvd in your drive and then rip from that. I would expect it to take around 20 to 40 minutes.

You can convert the VOB files from the VIDEO_TS folder regardless of where it is located to any format you like.

vicx

eyeinthesky wrote: »

It reads like you are trying to convert the video ts folders that you have copied to your pc, this is not the way to achieve what you want. You need to put the dvd in your drive and then rip from that. I would expect it to take around 20 to 40 minutes.

I did put the DVD in my drive and rip from that, it was going to take 20 minutes but I noticed it was copying the same video_ts files, so I would still have to convert it back to avi which takes around 2 hours for a 2gb file.

Or are you saying once the files have been ripped to the computer, it would take less time to convert it, rather than converting straight from the DVD?

asbokid

vicx wrote: »

I did put the DVD in my drive and rip from that, it was going to take 20 minutes but I noticed it was copying the same video_ts files, so I would still have to convert it back to avi which takes around 2 hours for a 2gb file.

Or are you saying once the files have been ripped to the computer, it would take less time to convert it, rather than converting straight from the DVD?

you did it the best way..

if the DVD isn't encrypted then DVD ripping is just "transcoding" by another name. It is taking the MPEG2-compressed VOB files on the DVD and converting them to a more efficient video encoding format - MPEG4/H.264 or whatever you chose.

There is nothing to gain from copying the VOB files to the PC before transcoding. The bottleneck is not in the file reading process but in the CPU-intensive transcoding operation.

asbokid

paddyrg wrote: »

The third answer, which many will accuse of being dumb but bear with me, is to play the DVD from a player, and use a capture card on your PC to save it to disk. There is a small amount of generational loss from going via analogue, it is true, but the process is done in real time, gives one file, and makes all the decisions for you.

The player does the MPEG2 decryption, the capture card does all the MPEG4 encoding, and probably has a simple interface for beginners use as well. All you have to do is hook up the yellow, red and white outputs from the DVD player to the same coloured inputs on the capture card with a short cable - easy. You can even get USB capture cards for £20 or so. This technique is very commonly used in industry, by the way, but with better capture cards and cabling.

Really? What industry rips DVDs using a capture card? It's the only option with VHS video cassettes, but DVDs are already in digital format and there isn't anything to gain. The only reason for using a capture card to rip DVDs is that it will defeat any copy protection mechanism on the DVD. But that comes at the cost of significant degradation in quality. There are better techniques to defeat that encryption.

paddyrg

asbokid wrote: »

Really? What industry rips DVDs using a capture card? It's the only option with VHS video cassettes, but DVDs are already in digital format and there isn't anything to gain. The only reason for using a capture card to rip DVDs is that it will defeat any copy protection mechanism on the DVD. But that comes at the cost of significant degradation in quality. There are better techniques to defeat that decryption.

Where the *only* source for the video is DVD, then yes. Don't forget even HDCAM-SR dubs are via frequently via analogue links. If, of course, you have a digibeta or HDCAM or whatever tape of the source, then you don't use a DVD as the source.

I did say people would accuse me of being dumb.