That’s a blanket no. Copying DVDs/Blu-rays is strictly against the license you agreed to when you purchased the disc.
The only part of ripping that is completely illegal in the US is breaking/bypassing copy protection. Copying for personal back-up use (under the assumption that one owns and keeps the original media and doesn’t distribute the copy) is covered by fair use protection. Bypassing or cracking copy protection/encryption, on the other hand, is illegal under the DMCA. A large number of DVDs are released without copy protection – in fact, I’m often surprised to find that big titles are unprotected – and copying these under the aforementioned assumptions is fine. (I’ve yet to see a Blu-Ray that wasn’t protected, but then I find them too big to rip anyway.)
The grey area, and one I haven’t seen pop up in any court decisions, is a full definition of the legal uses of a back-up. It could probably be cogently argued that a back-up copy is a copy made to be used in lieu of the original media if and only if the original media is rendered unusable. It would be probable that simultaneous use of an original and a back-up (one in the family car, one in the den), or of simultaneous use of the back-up across multiple devices violates the fair use law. My own use of back-ups fails the former argument; my original media is fine and usable, but I choose to use the rip rather than the original media, so the rip isn’t serving as a back-up… the original is. A primary use of back-ups for many would fail the latter; many rip for use on a portable device, or use the rip on multiple devices (one for the PC, one for the phone, the DVD in the living room).
Excellent point!
I should have addressed this in my OP.
There is one thing you should know. It’s very strange but my Sony player has a limitation on the directory structure.
It will only recognize file names that are a maximum of 3 levels deep.
In other words, the following name is recognized:
MEDIA\MOVIES\DRAMA\Lady_In_The_Lake.avi
But the following name is not recognized:
MEDIA\MOVIES\DRAMA\1940s\Lady_In_The_Lake.avi
It took me a long time to figure this out. I knew something was wrong with many of my files. But it took me a long time to figure out it was related to the depth in the directory tree structure.
I would very much appreciate if anyone could tell me if this is a universal restriction - if it applies to their machine as well - or is it just peculiar to my machine?
Thanks for the post. I never knew you could hook up an external drive to a DVD player.
One question – I have a lot of MP3s for learning languages on my PC, and I often need to back them up for ten seconds or so when I want to repeat something. The DVD player I have (which is pretty old) won’t let me do that with MP3 files; it only lets me go back to the beginning of a track. Does the Sony let you “rewind” or FF MP3s any amount you want?
I’m sorry to tell you this but it does not seem to recognize MP3 files at all.
When I access a folder full of MP3 files, it tells me “No playable files recognized”.
When I moved an MP3 file to the root directory, it does not even show up on the list.
My only assumption - which may well be wrong - is that it is a video player and does not play audio files. But that is silly because all of the software video players on my PC (like the Windows Media Player) are quite happy to play audio files. There is just no video portion in the window.
Perhaps someone else knows of a video player that will play audio files?
Or perhaps it will play some other kinds of audio files and you will have to convert MP3 files to some other kind of audo files.
Very sorry.
Definitely not universal. I use an LG Blu-Ray player, and previously an RCA DVD player, and neither had these types of restrictions. My current HD structure goes pretty deep. For my subscription sites, the usual structure I use: Media>Video>(genre)>Clips>(studio)>(year)>(month)>(clip series)>“filename.avi,” and I’ve successfully navigated deeper than that when playing around.
These kinds of restrictions are usually covered pretty well in the instruction book, which (understandably) few people look at beyond basic set-up info. The instructions are how I know the limitations of my device’s playback capabilities, rather than throwing random files at it in an effort to find something which will work. I’m surprised that your player won’t handle .mp3, but I’ll bet you can find out from its instructions what it can handle… could be as simple as renaming the extensions.
3 TB = 3000 GB
3000 GB / 8 GB = 375
So a 3 TB external HD is equivalent to about 375 jump drives with a capacity of 8 GB each. Not 375,000!
That’s strange, the description at Amazon says it does:
I guess they must be talking about MP3s that have been burned onto a CD or DVD. Thanks for the response, though.
Some may, but not all do. My Philips dvd player is less than a year old and it does not support external hard drives, just USB drives.
Oops!
Sorry.
Math was never my strong suit.
I can’t imagine that would make a difference.
It is more likely that I have made some kind of mistake and hopefully someone will post some info that will explain what is going on.
FYI: I took a DVD that had an MP3 file on it and tested it using Winamp and it played the MP3 file just fine. Then I inserted that DVD into my Sony DVD player and it did not even recognize the file existed. It showed all other files on that DVD but not the MP3 file. I should also say that the MP3 file was in the root directory of the DVD because I have experienced problems getting files recognized if they are in a folder that is more than 3 layers deep. See one of my above posts for more info on that.
I’m sorry but I really can’t make any firm conclusion for you. I would guess that whoever wrote that ad for Amazon made and error or was over-zealous. After all, do you know who wrote that? It may not have been someone employed by Sony or someone authorized to make statements about this particular player.
Still, I’m guessing the most likely explanation is that I have made some kind of error and that caused the player to not recognize MP3 files.
I hope someone else will post the answer to this problem. I would expect that someone here will know the answer. Please have patience. I’m guessing someone will help sort this out.
In the meantime, if you were to buy a player and it did not play MP3 files for you, could you get a full refund where you shop? If so you might like to take a chance and research some of the players that are available where you shop and see if any of them purport to play MP3 files. If they do, maybe it’s worth taking a chance on buying that unit. After all, the worst that could happen is that you would have to return the unit for a refund.
Good Luck to you. I would hope that someone will provide the info you need or that you may be able to find it through searching a combination of Google or Ask.com or other info sites like that.
About.com is another good one.
I have the User’s Guide here and on page 13 it says,
Playing from a USB Device
You can play video/music/photo files from the connected USB device.
However, it goes on to list all kinds of restrictions. There are many kinds of disks and devices that it will not play.
Here is a link to the User’s Guide and you can have a look if you are interested.
Tony Sinclair,
I have achieved success!
In the Troubleshooting section of the User’s Guide it says (on page 19):
If the interactive audio is not output, set BD Audio MIX Setting to On in the Audio Settings setup.
When I did that, it played the MP3 file flawlessly. It also had a FF and Reverse menu so that you could control the FF and Reverse functions and they both worked very well.
Good luck to you!
Wow, thanks so much for going to all that trouble. I live in a dinky little town, so I pretty much have to buy stuff like that on the net, and it’s a huge hassle to return things that don’t work. I can never even get the cords to fit back in the box.
Thanks again for the OP; I think I’m going to get one.
You’re missing my point. Those DVDs you burnt are DVD-Rs. Yeah, I agree with you that they don’t have much value once you’ve copied them off to your hard drive(s). What I’m saying is that DVDs of movies that you buy from the store still have value unless you’ve bought another version. They serve as a nice backup. (And you definitely can’t legally sell them and keep a copy on your hard drive!)
My point is, if you’d have said DVD-Rs in the title of this thread instead of DVDs, I think you would have encountered less resistance. People just don’t burn disks that much anymore, except to give stuff to friends, or, as mentioned above, as an extra backup of their important files.
It was my pleasure to help you. I was very happy to do it. If you are going to buy one, I would just like to advise you to:
-
Be certain it supports USB 3.0 and not just USB 2.0
-
Be certain it will support an external hard drive with a capacity of at least 3TB. I just wish I knew how you could find this out without actually purchasing it. I fear you would may have to write the manufacturer and ask them.
-
In the future, if you buy any Jump drives (aka Handy drives aka USB drives) make sure they are USB 3.0 and not USB 2.0. I have run some tests and have found that USB 3.0 devices are between 2 and 3 times faster than USB 2.0. But, it is very erratic and in one test it was twice as fast but in another test, it was three times as fast.
FYI, it was significantly faster when reading from a USB device than when writing to that device. I guess that makes sense because writing can involve an additional pass more so than reading. Although I am not certain of this.
- I’d like to suggest that you consider permitting me to communicate with you via private message. At present, it seems that your PM facility is disabled and I cannot send you PMs. But, if you think that you might like to give or receive some help from others in the future. I would suggest that you enable people to communicate with you privately.
I wish you the best of luck with your purchase. My purchase has been a real adventure and I hope you have a similar amount of fun with yours.
I have written some software utilities and I have some other freeware utility software that has been an enormous help to me when organizing huge libraries of video and audio files. Essentially this software enables me to check and ensure that files that exist in one folder also exist in another and to identify any files that are present in one folder but missing from another.
That may not sound like much of a big deal. But, I could never have managed my libraries without some software assistance because they contain many thousands of files.
I would have never believed that my libraries would have grown so large when I first started collecting these files but you may find - like I did find - that your libraries grow by leaps and bounds. Sometimes, I get the feeling that the acquisition of these files is more important or perhaps more of a compulsion that actually watching and enjoying them.
In any event, if you are interested, I would be very happy to share these freeware utilities (as well as the proprietary software utilities that I wrote) with you. But I would like to do that privately. Of course, I would offer them to you for free.
If you are interested, please send me a PM and we can take it from there.
These utilities are all very simple to use and I have found they save me a huge amount of time and effort.
As I have said before on here, I think all physical audiovisual media will likely be obsolete in not too many years, as will the whole concept of owning a music/film library. The norm will surely be to think of something you want to watch/listen to and download/stream it immediately from the cloud, or whatever we’re calling it by then.