How to archive a DVD on my hard drive

Newbie Forum
#1

If this is answered somewhere else please point me there. I don’t want the information needlessly repeated.

I have several DVDs that I friend of mine created of my son’s high school soccer career. They play fine but I want to archive them onto a hard drive, preferably one of my network drives and play them from there if possible. When I look at the DVD in Explorer there is a File Folder, called VIDEO_TS in my case, that contains several files including some *.bup, *.ifo and *.vob files. I can double click on the *.vob files and they will be played by my DVD software but they are not the whole program.

So how do I do what I want to do?

Larry

#2

You could use a program like DVD Shrink that’ll copy the DVD onto the hard drive in .iso format. you can then use a program like Power ISO to mount the iso to a virtual DVD drive. Or you can copy the files over to the hard drive & use something like VLC Media Player. I’m pretty sure it’ll play the whole thing once you’ve pointed it at the first file. Or you could rip it to your hard drive as an AVI file (don’t know any names off hand but I’m sure they wouldn’t be hard to find) and then you could watch it on any media player & it’d be smaller than the full DVD as well.

#3

Welcome to CDFreaks Forum, the way I have done this I have portioned a hard drive (let say 200GB) in to 5X40GB the I have dedicated each 40GB portioned to 8X5GB(each DVD movie averages 5GB) the has name each of these 5Gb directories as : MovieOne, MovieTwo, MovieThree …and MovieEight.

#4

Thanks, guys, for the information.

So what I have figured out, from what you tell me and looking thru various online sources, is that I can just copy the directories and files from the DVD to a hard drive and play from the hard drive with something like VLC Media Player (I couldn’t get Windows Media Player to even recognize the files or directory as anything useful).

Now, if I find that an acceptable way to store the DVDs on hard disk then how would I turn around and burn onto another DVD? Would I just copy the directory and files to a blank DVD just like I would if they were just plain vanilla data files or is there something special that needs to be done because it is to be a playable movie?

Larry

#5

I think it’s about time you carefully read and learned what the DVD Video format and terminlogy actually is.

#6

Thank you. A pointer to information was what I was seeking. That is why I came here to CDFreaks and used the newbie forum to ask the question and not in the dpreview forum I normally inhabit. It is where I hoped the best information could be obtained. I seemed to have been right. Thanks again.

Larry

#7

When I am in a lazy mood, I just create a folder on the desktop and name it, Then I copy and paste the movie DVD into the folder. You can use any player like Power DVD and highlight the Video_TS folder and it will play the movie. To copy to another DVD you can use any program to do that. Use the folder as the source instead of the DVD. If you use DVD Fab Platinum or another burning program, you can copy just the main movie etc. to the hard drive.

#8

That is in fact what I discovered and I am doing. Confirmation that there is not a gotcha doing it helps. Thanks.

Larry

#9

Glad you found a way that works. Just as a warning, make sure not to get the VIDEO_TS folders mixed up between the folders that you have labelled with the actual video title. All the filenames will be the same beneath that labelled folder and give you no clue as to what they are.

If it becomes a problem, then you can combine all the files which comprise each DVD-Video into one image, using something like the freeware ImgTool Classic. This produce a single file (a disc image) for each DVD-Video, and it can be burned straight to DVD using freeware DVD Decrypter or ImgBurn.

Just choose the Video_TS folder in the first box (see below), type the new archive name in the second, add a title to be added to the ‘disc’, and click the word ‘Image’ with the disc icon next to it.
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