dvd's to laptop to watch on tv

gill5blue

Hi
I would like to copy all my dvds to my laptop. Then watch them on the tv using laptop.
How big would the hard drive have to be?
I would like to do this to remove dvds from living room. I have just bought an ipod and are currently puuting my cds on to this, and this gave me the idea.

Can anyone advise me as to the best way to go about this?

Cheers

aerostar

Depending on the film, it can be upto 10GB each, so for 50 films you would need at least a 500GB drive.

Nilrem

aerostar wrote: »

Depending on the film, it can be upto 10GB each, so for 50 films you would need at least a 500GB drive.

If you conver the files using a more efficient codex than the (aging) mpeg2 one, you can usually drop the file size by about 80%+ (x264 or similar to a dixv/avi/mp4 file, uses a lot less space than the same film in mpeg2 at the same res*).
However doing so tends to require a fair bit of time per disk.


*Mainly because mpeg2 is a very old codec now, and was chosen for DVD's back when it was the best compromise between picture, file size and processing costs (back when your average PC needed a dedicated decoder card for reliable playback!).

Lifeforms

You need to find a converting process first that you can do/deal with/accept the length it takes, then take the file size, add a little, and multiply it by however many DVD's you have, then you have the size of drive.

If you are looking to do something like DVD shrink it, then it's less file size than the DVD size itself, more than if you just converted a copy. It's also dependent on whether you want specials, multiple languages, subtitles etc too. (ie a whole disk copy, or just a main film copy)