Copying a DVD to a hard drive

[rfdjr1]

Is it possible, and if so, what's a good program, to copy a video DVD, or
actually parts of one, to a hard drive, so that the video can be watched without
having to put the DVD disk in the drive? I have some music instructional videos
I'd like to be able to watch on the computer, and be able to jump back and forth
to different lessons without having to stop and keep changing disks. These are
commercially bought DVD's that I own. I'm using Windows 7 Professional. Thanks.

 

[Nil]

Is it possible, and if so, what's a good program, to copy a video
DVD, or actually parts of one, to a hard drive, so that the video
can be watched without having to put the DVD disk in the drive? I
have some music instructional videos I'd like to be able to watch
on the computer, and be able to jump back and forth to different
lessons without having to stop and keep changing disks. These are
commercially bought DVD's that I own. I'm using Windows 7
Professional. Thanks.

You don't need a special program to copy the disk, just copy the files
like you would any other. What's more important is that your player
program be able to play DVD content from the hard disk. The only one
I'm familiar enough with to recommend is Media Player Classic - all you
need to do is drag 'n drop the VIDEO_TS folder on MPC and it will play.
I'm sure other programs are suitable.

 

[Paul]

Is it possible, and if so, what's a good program, to copy a video DVD, or
actually parts of one, to a hard drive, so that the video can be watched without
having to put the DVD disk in the drive? I have some music instructional videos
I'd like to be able to watch on the computer, and be able to jump back and forth
to different lessons without having to stop and keep changing disks. These are
commercially bought DVD's that I own. I'm using Windows 7 Professional. Thanks.

I did something like this just yesterday.

I have three DVDs I prepared, by recording from a VCR using a WinTV Go
card. The DVDa are dual layer, and contain about 7GB of files.

Now, when I tried to copy them (no encryption to worry about, as they're not
commercial or anything), the "riplock" on my drive came into play.
I seemed to be copying the files at ~300KB/sec or so. I didn't even
seem to be getting 1x rate from the player, for a DVD. It would
have taken *hours* to complete the transfer via Explorer.

So, next I tried "dd". And I got 4MB/sec. To copy the entire DL DVD
still takes half an hour, but it's better than the "riplock" case.

The format of the dd copy, is .iso, and that means, you'll need
a "virtual CD" type of application that knows how to mount an
ISO9660 file. Now, 7-ZIP knows how to open an ISO9660 file, so
you can right-click on the output of the dd step, and extract
all the files with 7-ZIP. If you have two disks, with the
7GB ISO9660 file on one disk, and the target VOB directory on the
other disk, they should copy at close to disk-limited rates.
(I just tested it, and it is copying the files out of the ISO9660 image
at 40MB/sec. So 3 minutes from now, I'll have all the VOB files.)

So my recipe, is intended to speed up the physical copy step,
of getting "all the bits" off the DVD, onto a hard drive file.
You can either find a "virtual CD" kind of application,
to mount that file, or simple tear it apart with 7-ZIP.

This is the recipe to do that part.

1) http://www.chrysocome.net/dd (I use dd-0.5)

2) Open an MSDOS (Command Prompt window). With the
DVD inserted in the drive, run

dd --list

3) Now, examine the entries. This is the size of my home made
DVD, with way too many chapters in it.

\\?\Device\CdRom1
Removable media other than floppy. Block size = 2048
size is 7597457408 bytes

4) Factor the 7GB number. 7,597,457,408 = 262144 * 28982

The optical drive, serves 2048 byte sectors. 262144 is
a multiple of that. The purpose of using relatively large
transfer size, is to prevent small transfer size requests,
from slowing the operation.

5) Now, select a hard drive with enough space. My N:\ partition
is used for that. The input specification, is a block device.
The output specification, is a file to be stored on the partition.
The N:\ partition is NTFS, and can handle the 7GB movie.iso file.
This command would break, if N:\ was FAT32, due to the 4GB file
limit.

dd if=\\?\Device\CdRom1 of=N:\movie.iso bs=262144 count=28982

That command is attempting to transfer, exactly the size
reported by the --list option. In practice, it failed to
work exactly right for me. But it did not prevent the
ISO from being accessible. Windows reports:

movie.iso 7,597,410,304 bytes

so I ended up a bit short. Total time, 30 + 4 minutes, to get
my hands on the files. If I'd copied with Explorer, it would
still be running the transfer today.

HTH,
Paul

 

[VanguardLH]

Is it possible, and if so, what's a good program, to copy a video DVD, or
actually parts of one, to a hard drive, so that the video can be watched without
having to put the DVD disk in the drive? I have some music instructional videos
I'd like to be able to watch on the computer, and be able to jump back and forth
to different lessons without having to stop and keep changing disks. These are
commercially bought DVD's that I own. I'm using Windows 7 Professional. Thanks.

See replies to your SAME post that you separately MULTI-posted in other
newsgroups. Now you'll have to remember to which other newsgroups you
multi-posted and go check each of them for replies instead of
maintaining the discussion within a single cross-posted thread.

Learn to cross-post:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossposting
http://www.blakjak.demon.co.uk/mul_crss.htm
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/usenet/xpost.html

 

[Char Jackson]

Is it possible, and if so, what's a good program, to copy a video DVD, or
actually parts of one, to a hard drive, so that the video can be watched without
having to put the DVD disk in the drive?

I've been using DVD Decrypter v3.5.4.0 for several years. It's long
been discontinued and unsupported, but works perfectly for what I do.
I primarily use it to create ISO images from DVDs, then I use Virtual
Clone Drive to mount the ISO image. VCD creates a virtual DVD drive
and is very light weight and easy to use.

<http://www.slysoft.com/en/virtual-clonedrive.html>

 

[C.Joseph Drayton]

Is it possible, and if so, what's a good program, to copy a video DVD, or
actually parts of one, to a hard drive, so that the video can be watched without
having to put the DVD disk in the drive? I have some music instructional videos
I'd like to be able to watch on the computer, and be able to jump back and forth
to different lessons without having to stop and keep changing disks. These are
commercially bought DVD's that I own. I'm using Windows 7 Professional. Thanks.

I hate wasting space, so I rip the DVD to an AVI using WnX-DVD-Ripper.
The freeware versiojn can be found at:


http://www.bestfreewaredownload.com/freeware/t-free-winx-dvd-ripper-freeware-vbilitzm.html

An average 2 hour movie converts down to 1.1GB (average). Once the file
is an AVI file, it can be edited with an application like VirtualDub
which is handy when creating training videos where you want to splice
together scenes from multiple DVDs. If I need to burn a new copy of the
disk, I use DVDFlck which will create a DVD5 disk that will read on a
standard DVD player.

Sincerely,
C.Joseph Drayton, Ph.D. AS&T

CSD Computer Services

Web site: http://csdcs.site90.net/
E-mail: (e-mail address removed)90.net