computer? I want to copy some movies before business trips so I can watch them on the plane. I assume buying a Dell DVD player is rather pricey.

The company may even have a plug and play for the one you have.

you'll need decoder software to rip the files from the dvd.

I just went on vacation with a laptop, no DVD player. On my desktop, I ripped my DVD's onto the hard drive, then encoded them with DivX. I copied about 5 movies onto the laptop. It's great- DVD quality movies at around 650 megs each (roughly 90 minutes).

go to
www.tomshardware.com

he has links with shareware stuff that lets you do this

I think what you did is what I want to do.

I meant from a DVD player...not from a PC

that is internal is a better buy than that

do you mean you captured the decoded stream, or that you copied the data files over to your hard drive, and then encoded them?

I have software that will copy the data files (.vob?) to the drive, which I assume would let you play the content the same as if you had the DVD. Not sure how to encode it to another format, though.

I ripped several 2 hour movies and on my 933mhz 384 MB ram box it took between 16 and 20 hours to encode. Plus you lose picture quality. Much better idea is to buy a dvd player but if interested check out www.doom9.net

a dvd player...but you can bororw from friends and then put it onto your harddrive :)...but yes the VOB file is around 4-8gigs but once converted can be around 600mb-1.5g. Well atleast the ones i have had