My DVD player does in fact have the old school RCA jacks on the back. How else to plug into your late-model Sony Trinitron?
Does this mean that my DVD player downconverted digital media to composite analog and fed it out the RCA jacks? And if it DID, is it going to produce a crappy end product to take the de-digitized signal out of the DVD player and pass it through this device and onto an SSD?
Yes, DVD players converted the digital signal from the discs into analog signals for the TVs of the time, which were analog–including the Composite connectors you are talking about, as well as S-Video and Compontent video.
You get DVI in 1999, but it wasn’t that common on video equipment, but mostly computers. You get HDMI in 2002, with DVD-audio support in 2004. That’s when it would finally become practical for a DVD player to not convert the signal to analog.
That said, you generally do not want to use a DVD player for ripping DVDs. You want to use a DVD-ROM drive of some sort, which can read the digital data and get it into the computer. Then other software (like Handbrake) can package that data into a file or reencode it into a more modern format. That way it remains all digital (except when you actually watch it.)
Beowulff, not sure this will work. My only DVD player is a cheap stand-alone unit that plugs into my Mac via a USB-1 jack. It launches the DVD Player software in the Mac.
In reading the How To Use manual, it appears I have to have a video & audio file already on my Mac. No?
If it reads DVD data disks (such as software install disks) it’s a DVD-ROM drive.
You can use handbrake, or many DVD imaging software programs, to rip or convert a DVD to a video file. My favourite back in the day was dvdshrink which shrank a 9GB DVD to a 4.3GB ISO image, which programs like VLC can play, but includes also all the extras of a DVD like special features. However, that program disappeared long ago, due to complaints by DVD makers.
Unfortunately it appears that DVD Shrink is a PC program while the OP says they have a Mac.
Also, that site seems a little sketchy to me. The download page has a long piece of text explaining that DVD Shrink is freeware, but nevertheless, you need to make a donation in order to download it.
It’s not necessary to make a donation to download it. They do lay the donation request a bit thick, but they’re trying to fund the hosting for the site from those donations.
Well, they must be hiding it pretty well. I’ve pored over that page at least five times and I still don’t see any way to download without donating.
And honestly, I think they’re overstating the costs of maintaining their server. I maintain a freeware product which, I am confident, must get at least 10, maybe 100 times as many downloads as DVD Shrink. The server costs me $8 per month.
OK you’re right. I checked on a mobile phone and assumed the underlined version number on that page was a hyperlink. It’s not. I can’t see any easy way to get to the download without going through the donation process. That is indeed sketchy.
Hmmmm. This thread is going down a path I did not anticipate. Mods, to be crystal-clear here: I OWN all of the DVDs I wish to transfer to a SDD. I paid for them. Sometimes in a pawn shop or discount store just a few dollars, others were premium-priced.
I have zero interest in any discussion that even approaches how to pirate a DVD. I am perfectly willing and able to pay for a hardware dongle and/or software that will let me accomplish this.
Appreciate the links and info so far and am following this obviously with interest. Just needed to make this very strong statement in here.
Now then. Yeah, it’s a DVD-ROOM player that sits on the desk and plugs in. Minimalist in function thought it does offer Menu, Chapter and Audio setting interfaces. A portion of the DVD in those binders are older home movies that I digitized either from VHS-C tapes ( quaint, yes? ) or copied over from Mini-DV tapes using a DVD Recorder. For a short while I was shooting and editing small projects and this one-at-a-time DVD Recorder suited my needs for output and “printing” of DVDs for clients. It was not a black box and could not defeat any of the copyguarding software that was in use back then.
Even though they were not commercially finalized and “printed”, one would hope that any hardware or software that would be employed here to bring it onto the Mac and out to a SDD would read them as well.
Why transfer to an SSD? Large-file-size media, specifically video, gets little to no benefit from the speed of SSDs. Noise and/or power use? I keep all my media on standard spinning hard drives, same for my offside deep data archives, because it’s still significantly cheaper, and there are concerns that unpowered SSDs can lose data over time. How prevalent that is remains unclear, I’ve seen anything from 15 years to less than one year, but that’s moot if you’re using it occasionally.
I don’t see how you expect to discuss software for getting DVD data onto a computer without “even approaching” how to pirate a DVD. The software that you would use to do one is the software that you would use to do the other. It is like saying that you want to know about opening cans without approaching discussing can openers.
If you have the discs and access to a computer DVD drive, you do not need to pirate anything, just copy the files. Do not shrink, compress, re-encode or anything non-reversible.
Are you talking about the DVD Content Scrambling System? That has not been an issue for decades, and never had to do with pirating except everybody remembers that Universal Studios tried to sue a bunch of people, under various specious pretexts, for publishing a DVD player that worked under Linux.