Classic British Flight Sim

Being house-bound and occasionally bed confined for days at a time I had a brilliant idea. I have loads of aircraft DVDs that I could transfer to the removeable Media Drive on my PC and then, when I am confined I can just turn on the PC and play DVDs to my hearts content without burdening SWMBOWQ to change DVDs for me. Before I go any further, all the DVDs in my collection are pucka items, bought from reputable dealers and my intention is to make life a bit easier for those around me - I am not into pirate products of any type.

So, the idea seems good and easy to do? Well, not so far. I have tried copying DVDs to the HD but the results are a bunch of folders which have to be started individually and then Windows Media Player will not recognise the files as being the correct region. Real Player will play the DVDs but only in chunks of about 20 minutes and - again - each piece has to be manually highlighted.

So I come to the font of all knowledge to ask for guidance. Am I going to resolve this problem or am I wasting my time trying to make life a bit easier for everyone?

Thank you in advance.





Allan

You need a prog to decrypt the DVD and rip it to your HD removing the region coding.
PowerDVD will play DVD files on a HD without problems.

Since you have successfully played bits of the DVD, it is likely that they are not encrypted and hence can be played with any software DVD player (note that movies will be encrypted and hence, as DaveG indicates, they will need to be ripped to the hard disk).

For now, let's keep it simple - those that work by simply copying the files from DVD to hard disk will have several files. A mix of VOB and IFO. When a DVD plays in a player, it automatically jumps from one file to the next. So first you have to identify the index file which knows about this and that is the one to "play". Then the whole DVD should follow.

Realplayer might work if you choose the correct starting file but I don't use that.

Instead, having just checked with some home made DVDs (which do not have encryption), I suggest that you try Meda Player Classic.

Go to:
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfile ... _id=403110

Download: mpc2kxp6490.zip from the choices.

Unzip the single file in there to a folder of your chice and you have "Media Player Classic".

Start up this Media Player, and from the File menu select "Open File". Click the top Browse button and go to the directory containing your DVD files. Choose VIDEO_TS.IFO files (if it is there, othewise another IFO file), the "Open" and "OK".

Your DVD should star to play. To get a bigger picture without all the information, press ALT and Return keys together. To get the menus back press ALT and Return keys together again.

If any of the DVDs don't play, they will need ripping - a lesson for another day.

Meanwhile come back with any questions about things that are not clear.

Ian

I have quite a large collection of DVDs and I used to take a large selection away to sea with me. Inevitably people come knocking on my door asking to borrow a DVD. Fast forward a couple of months and I can't remember who has got what DVD, I would get them back scratched, and sometimes I wouldn't get them back at all :@ I decided last year to rip all my DVDs to an external hard drive, it would be much easier to carry around and I could leave the discs in their cases at home where they wouldn't get lost or damaged.

The programme I use is "Cucusoft Ultimate DVD Converter". Google it and you will find it easily enough. It lets you rip a DVD and you can specify the output file format (I use AVI files with DIVX compression). You can also specify the output quality and therefore file size (I use 4000kbps which gives me a very slight reduction in image quality but shrinks the size of a typical film to anything from 2GB-4GB). I have something like 180 odd films and more than 40 television series all stored on a 1TB external drive.

If you want to rip DVDs that contain several episodes on a single disc you may want to try "Imtoo DVD Ripper Platinum". It is very similar to the Cucusoft programme but it allows you to queue tracks from the same disc, something Cucusoft doesn't do and can become very tedious if yo have a TV series containing a dozen episodes spread across three or four discs. The only thing I don't like about Imtoo is it doesn't have the same flexibility in controlling the output quality. Basically you can't set anything between 2500kbps (which creates a fairly noticeable drop in quality) or original quality (HUGE output file size).

There are alos some decent freeware progs out there that do the same thing - some of which output as .TAO or .VOB etc, some of which (I forget off the top of my head) are basically 'mpeg' - all you need to do is rename the file to end in .mpg, and windows media player will see it and play it.

I found this out after realising I had some unfinalized DVDs from a Sony recorder I had, and had ripped the contents but couldn't play them until I chanced upon the answer....

I'll see if I can find the programs I used (gone in a recent format of the HDD)