I just bought a My Passport external hard drive for the purpose of taking my DVD collection when I travel rather than the actual discs. I had thought that it would be as simple as copying from one drive to the other in Explorer. When I do copy it I get a lot of folders and files in names that I don’t understand. All I want is to be able to open a folder with the title on it, click on the file and have my viewer open it up and play it - like my Toshiba DVD Player does when I put the actual disc in the drawer.
Install VLC, use it to open the biggest file in your DVD. I think it’s Video_TS, one of the .vob files. You could try the first .ifo file, I think that’s the menu.
Use Handbrake. Converting the DVDs to a newer video format (like MP4) will allow you to use less space and play on more players. You also wouldn’t have to deal with the annoying menus, DVD encryption, mounting/unmounting, etc., just click and play any given movie.
This is completely false and just copying the files will run into the same problem. You just have to do one more step. Let the disc open in your DVD player of choice and play the main title. Then check what Title # is being played (usually every trailer, movie, extra has its own Title). Go to Handbrake > File > Open Title (Source Specific) and enter the Title # of the main movie and Handbrake should look like a charm. This should allow it to not read the whole disk and the dummy/bad sectors that they use to protect your DVD from yourself. The only movies that I’ve not been able to convert were ones that had been too scratched by my kids that they were physically protected and would skip badly anyway in a straight DVD player.
You will often see that they have put 99 titles on many discs to prevent copying, but the data is still on the disc to tell the player which is the correct one to actually play. So it is a shortsighted “protection” strategy.
If that’s too much trouble and DVD encryption is giving you issues with Handbrake or other rippers, download the free trial of AnyDVD – good for 21 days – and do your ripping within that timeframe.
It should be obvious, of course, that you should only do this with DVDs that you own yourself.
If you have plenty of disk space, this is the easiest option. If you’re unsure what file is the actual movie, you can just copy the entire contents of the DVD to a folder and point VLC at the folder and it’ll find it.
This will work even for copy-protected DVDs, AFAIK. (No 100% guarantees.)
If you want to save disk space and rip the DVDs, well, there’s lots of software out there to do it but frankly it’s all hard-to-use and of questionable legality (at least in the US). So I’d recommend the easier solution, and look into ripping when you run short of disk space.
Those are both freeware for windows, put your DVD movie in the DVD drive on your PC and run DVDecryptor and it will create an .iso file which will be a perfect copy of your DVD on the hard drive, size will be from 4-9 gigabytes.
Then to view them use VLC player and open the iso, easy.
At one point in time only hand break on Macs could do this with protected DVDs does this now work on Windows PCs. This worked on Macs because the Mac OS was decrypting the DVDs.
The handbreak website still says it will not crack the encryption