Transfer all my DVD's To external 500Gb Hardrive

[telboy1938]

Can anyone explain to a novice the correcy way to transfer all my DVD's to a 500Gb USB external Hard-drive please...Many thanks...Tel

[pug100]

It depends on how many dvds you have really.
Single sided disc holds up to 4.7GB so without further compression you'll get just over 100 dvds on the HDD. Many commmercial dvds are dual layer holding up to 9.4GB so halve that number.

Now the tricky bit you'll need to rip the dvds one by one onto the HDD and bypass the copy protection too. For this use DVD Decrypter which is free, instructions are here.

http://www.doom9.org/

If you want to lose all the extras (sub menus games extra comm tracks ) and just leave the film you'll need to re-authour each disc with something such as DVD Shrink which is also free, instructions on the doom9 website.

This all takes time and a lot of effort so be prepared .

[telboy1938]

Thanks pug100, I take it that I do exactly the same as if I was copying from an original dvd via shrink or dvdfab decrypter etc...but instead of burning a new disc, I would sent it to the usb hard-drive. Is that correct? I believe there is a programme called Divx which condences the films by as much as a third. Tel

[fo3nix]

I'd use Handbrake with the Apple TV preset:

http://handbrake.fr/

It's free, works very well, and will compress your files as well as anything else while preserving quality.

It'll turn a film into a .mp4 file (or .m4v, I forget). Just drag that to your hard drive.

Quicktime, VLC, even Windows Media Player should be able to play the files back.

[pug100]

The files are all saved to the HDD in the location / folder you specify prior to burning so just make a folder for each film. There will be a few VOB files as aech packet holds around 1GB.

DIVX is great for compressing stuff too but I'd personally only use it if watching on a tiny screen. I find the artefacts introduced by compression too hard to watch for long periods such as that of a film. Try it out on one film first to see if you still find the product watchable, doesn't do great things for fast paced action or gloomy / dark scenes.

[telboy1938]

Many thanks for your help guys...Tel

[fo3nix]

(The artifacts pug talks about are mostly gone if using h.264 codec with Handbrake. It's how Apple encodes movies and TV shows on the iTunes Store.)