Copying DVDs to hard drive

Rocker

Is this possible and if so, how is it done? I have a few guitar instruction DVDs, it would be really useful if they were on my computer hard drive (like most of my music is). Thanks

octatonic

Mac or PC?

On a Mac I use Mac the Ripper and/or Handbrake.

RedRabbit

Handbrake is now pretty much available regardless of platform and is a piece of piss to use.  I'd need some fairly specific requirements to look elsewhere.

Axe_meister

Or MakeMKV.

You will also need something to strip off the copy protection. I use AnyDVD.

Myranda

How do you want the DVDs when on the computer?

Do you want the picture+sound or the whole DVD with menu?

Two different options - different answers depending on the answer.

Rocker

Myranda, either way is fine. The menu system on most tutorial DVDs usually makes finding an element of the song easy to find. But any way that works is ok by me. Windows 7 is my OS

Fazer

the simplest solution is this freeware:
http://www.dvdfab.com/hd-decrypter.htm

it will remove any protections and copy either the entire disc or 'main movie' if you choose

using other programs to re-encode just the 'movie' to your hard drive will use up less space but will take time, maybe an hour or 2 depending on size/processing power/etc, if you just copy the full disc be aware that each one will need a few GBs space.

it probably only takes 5-15 mins to copy the full disc to hard drive

Myranda

Well, an ideal way would be to use Nero to copy the DVD as an .ISO then use something like DemonTools to mount that ISO in a virtual drive whenever you want to watch it and if you do some fiddling with Windows Media Center you can have DVDs appear as a library which automatically mounts and unmounts discs as you go. This makes viewing DVDs as simple as browsing an iTunes list - complete with menus. However... This method uses up a lot of space, 4.5-9gb per disc. (You'd also still need something like AnyDVD to ignore the Copy Protection). This is my favourite option, but can quickly eat up terrabytes of data and leave you wanting to invest in some sort of massive datacentre (very very expensive - 144Tb is the largest single consumer device I know of, and that's going to be £4500 + 36 4Tb drives! Not that in my mad scientist ways I thought about it...)

Or, you can strip JUST the video at full quality- this uses marginally less space... 

ORRRR, you can compress it - something like Handbrake can do this for you - Some brilliantly clever algorithms mean you only need the pixels that are changing to be stored so video can be compressed a fair bit without impairing image quality ... and some video that you don't mind using a few less pixels can be made much smallerer... Handbrake pr MakeMKV + AnyDVD would be a good way for this.

Rocker

I did not realize that so much hard drive space was needed for a DVD.  I (naively) thought that as CDs and DVDs are the same size, a DVD could be ripped to hard drive like EAC does to my CDs. Not buying another large hard drive but thanks to all for their replies and input.

Myranda

Using something like Handbrake you can manage to get a DVD down to CD size, so 650-700mb is easy enough while still being watchable