Yeah I’m talking about ripping not just copying, like moving files.
Aceplace57, have you tried other transcoding/ripping programs? They vary considerably as to features and speed. I’ve used Handbrake, but it isn’t my first choice. There’s a million of 'em out there. DVDFab has been good to me, although I forget what features on it are free; some require payment.
Full features for 30 days, after which you lose most features. IIRC you can still rip DVDs, but you’ll have to use another program to compress them if it’s dual layer. As I prefer other compression methods, it’s no big loss, it just takes longer to do DVD–>Big ISO–>Little ISO. That second step is much faster than the first one, though.
AcePlace57 - you might want to check the DVD to see who produced it - some Sony DVDs use anticopying measures (hardcoded bad blocks on the DVD) that really slow down direct copying of the VOB files. Playing the DVD in a hardware player uses the menu system to skip the bad blocks. Using something like Handbrake (which finds the main feature to encode) avoids that problem.
To speed up the transcoding, you also might want to look at whether your video card GPU can be used to offload the work from the CPU - GPUs are much faster at that sort of thing. Of course, it takes the right combination of hardware and software to get that sort of thing right.
The reason why copying first is faster is because you only need to be around for copying. Say you have 1 hour. You can:[ol]
[li]Copy 4 DVDs, then encode at your leisure[/li][li]Copy and encode at the same time, at the most 2 DVDs[/li][/ol]
What you should be doing is copy like mad when you’re around, then set up an encoding queue to run overnight.