Back Up DVD's

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October 28th, 2002, 04:43 PM
imported_Tek Weasel

Back Up DVD's

I was just curious if there is a legit piece of software that would allow me to actually back up my DVD's. I have been having problems with my DVD collection during travel. I have a laptop with DVD player, and I don't know if it is my laptop, dvd player, or travel case, but I have damaged a few of my DVD's and I don't want to lose any more. Another alternative would be, can I back up my DVD's on my laptop in a MPEG, DIVX, or any other type of format so I don't have to bring my DVD's with me on my travels.

I used to just rent DVD's for my travels, but the video place I visit claim that a few of the DVD's that I have rented have been returned by other customers that say the sound is messed up or the CD is scratched, or it skips.

Please help me, I just want to watch movies when I travel... Is that too much to ask?

:confused: :confused: :confused:
October 28th, 2002, 04:57 PM
Phat_Penguin

try this site .... there are many tools that will allow you to back up your DVD's in many different formats to be saved on CD's ... some are simple to use others can be quite complicated - the choice is yours and many are free.

The site also offers tutorials on backing up your DVD's with the various tools.

http://www.digital-digest.com/dvd/downloads/index.html
October 28th, 2002, 08:57 PM
micael

One good tool for a temporary backup of DVD's are EasyDivX. Its aint the pro's choice but for a temporary personal solution is it a good choice. Its really easy to make a movie with decent quality, but if you want to have perfect backup's then this is not the tool for you. For choice of good codecs both for encoding and decoding can I recomend Nimo Codec Pack since it contains most of all codecs you ever will need.

Another good way to watch dvd movies with perfect quality is to use for example SmartRipper or FlaskMPEG and then save the whold DVD to disc and play it with PowerDVD, this takes a lots of disc and may not be a good solution.

From the DVD to disc rip can you easilly encode it to the format you want with different tools and everyone has ofcourse their own favorites.

One good link amongst many sources are Doom9.net.

For the legal issue of making a personal backup do you have to consult the laws in your country and the author of the dvd's you want to backup.

~micael
October 28th, 2002, 11:00 PM
problemchild

Funny enough you should ask....... :D

Everybody will probably recommend DivX ;) compressed AVIs that you can play on your notebook, and that may very well be the way to go if portability and quality are your main concerns. That is undoubtedly the highest quality format available today. However, if you want to also play them on your set-top DVD player, there is another option which is easy to overlook.

For the last couple of weeks I've been experimenting very heavily with the Video CD (VCD) and Super Video CD (SVCD) formats for transferring my old off-air VHS tapes to a more durable format. I've been quite frankly amazed at what is actually possible with the format. The format is often ridiculed for poor quality and lack of sufficient running time to hold an entire movie, but most people who think that don't know that you can go outside the specs and create eXtended Video CDs (XVCDs) that will hold a 2 hour movie on 2 regular 80-minute CDs at near DVD quality.

Right now, I'm encoding my old Green Hornet tapes as 352x480 MPEG-1 at about 1.8 Mbit/s, and they're indistinguishable from the VHS source. (I don't know if that's good or bad considering the quality of my tapes. :D) That gives me about 67 minutes of running time, which will hold 3 episisodes per disc. I can also create DVD-like navigation menus with motion and sound.

But I can capture video directly from DirecTV with s-video, and it functions basically as a DVD-quality digital VCR. SVCD is indistinguishable from DVD to my eyes, but it has a poor running time of 35-45 minutes.

Sorting out all the formats like VCD, SVCD, XVCD, XSVCD, CVD, cDVD, miniDVD, and all the resolutions that go with each and what uses MPEG-1 and what uses MPEG-2, as well as what players will play what formats, is just about the biggest cluster f@*k I've ever seen, but if you have the patience to sort it all out and experiment a little, you can do some really amazing things with them.

More info is at www.vcdhelp.com
October 29th, 2002, 02:33 AM
dspeidel

Re: Back Up DVD's

Quote:

Originally posted here by Tek Weasel
I was just curious if there is a legit piece of software that would allow me to actually back up my DVD's. I have been having problems with my DVD collection during travel. I have a laptop with DVD player, and I don't know if it is my laptop, dvd player, or travel case, but I have damaged a few of my DVD's and I don't want to lose any more. Another alternative would be, can I back up my DVD's on my laptop in a MPEG, DIVX, or any other type of format so I don't have to bring my DVD's with me on my travels.

I used to just rent DVD's for my travels, but the video place I visit claim that a few of the DVD's that I have rented have been returned by other customers that say the sound is messed up or the CD is scratched, or it skips.

Please help me, I just want to watch movies when I travel... Is that too much to ask?

:confused: :confused: :confused:

I've been playing with DVDCopyPlus from http://www.321studios.com/. It is designed for the situation you describe above (one I too have experianced). Its a 3 phase project:
1.) Rip the DVD to your HD
2.) Encode the DVD as an avi and mpeg
3.) Burn the mpeg in VCD format and play it in any DVD player

I have not been able to get beyond step 2 yet -but I am working on it. At the moment I would not recommend purchasing it -I have not yet been successfully (w2k, 384 ram 25 GB HD 15 GB free 16mb video card p3 700mhz). If I am successful I will let you kow. I purchased it and I have begun a dialgue with customer support.

Cheers,

-D