| Home | “…you can even watch your favorite DVD on a library computer by carrying an 8 GB flash drive on you key ring!” |
Note: This tutorial assumes that extensions for known file types are not hidden. (1. Click Start. 2. Click Computer. 3. Click Organize. 4. Click Folder and search options…. 5. Click the View tab. 6. Make sure that Hide extensions for known file types is unchecked. 7. Click OK. 8. Close the Computer window.)
This technique not only makes it more convenient to play your DVDs, but it also helps to prevent your DVDs from getting dirty or, worse yet, damaged.
You can quickly turn your video DVD collection into a “video jukebox” with no loss of features or quality. Sound too good to be true? Well, I’m in the process of doing just that, and the results are amazing! The idea is to copy all of them to your computer’s hard drive. Not enough room on your hard drive? External USB hard drives are coming down in price. On Black Friday of 2008, Walmart was selling 500 GB USB hard drives for only US$69! (Video players can play movies directly from a USB 2.0 hard drive with no “jerkiness” whatsoever.) Also, why bother taking all of the time and electricity necessary to compress your DVDs down to AVI, MP4 or MKV files when hard drive prices are so low? Doing a high quality compression using the H.264 video codec can take hours, whereas using the HD Decrypter feature of DVDFab (http://www.DVDFab.com/free.htm) usually takes less than 20 minutes!
Another big advantage of this method is that you can organize your DVDs any way you want. For example, you might name a movie folder “Slumdog Millionaire (2008) 8.7,” where the “8.7” is the imdb.com rating. You could put the movie folder into a genre folder named Drama, with links (“shortcuts”) to it in the Romance and Crime folders.
For a typical collection of 160 DVDs, how much storage space will be required? Assuming an average of 6 GB per DVD, 160 x 6 = 960 GB. Therefore, you would need two 500 GB hard drives.
If you want to play the movies using surround sound headphones or through your home theater system using a discrete 6 or 8 channel optical audio cable, you could purchase the Turtle Beach Ear Force AK-R8 surround sound headphones, which includes the Audio Advantage SRM 7.1 Channel USB Audio Interface (http://www.turtlebeach.com/products/akr8/home.aspx). Then even older computers with 2 channel sound cards could be used. Even computers with no digital video output could be used, because most modern HD TVs have a VGA computer input.
Again, for a typical collection of 160 DVDs, assuming an average of 15 minutes copy time per DVD and working an average of 8 hours per day, 160 x 15 / 60 / 8 = 5 days.
As far as software goes, all that you need are two programs:
1. CyberLink PowerDVD (http://www.cyberlink.com/)
2. DVDFab (http://www.DVDFab.com/free.htm)
If you can find a portable version of Power DVD to download, it will do just fine. It loads a little slower than the regular version, but the advantage is that you don’t have to install it. The last time I checked, you could download a portable version from the following URL: http://rapidshare.com/files/123728508/PPd8Ultra_CS.rar. After this portable version is uncompressed using WinRAR, it only takes up 92.7 MB. Therefore, you can very easily include it on each of your USB movie hard drives. Then you will be able to watch your DVDs on any computer, even a library computer, without having to install anything. Another advantage of the portable version is that it’s free with no use restrictions whatsoever!
I like Power DVD better than any other software DVD player for the following reasons:
1. It has an automatic resume feature.
2. You can move the video forward one frame at a time.
3. You can move the video in reverse a few frames at a time.
If you convert the main movie of a DVD to an AVI, MP4, or MKV file, you will lose many of the DVD’s features and some of the movie’s quality. Also, PowerDVD’s features numbers 1 and 3 above will no longer work, and you will lose the ability to display closed captioning. This is important because many DVDs have CC, but no subtitles.
DVDFab is also available on the Internet in a portable version, but the only portable versions that I’ve tried do not include the HD Decrypter feature. Therefore, I recommend that you download the free version directly from the software vendor’s website. Then you can be assured that the version that you are using contains all of the latest features for removing the DVDs’ copy protection. Also, the HD Decrypter feature of the original version does not have any restrictions, so it is probably the best way to go. Unfortunately, even DVDFab HD Decrypter will reduce the quality of the original DVD slightly if the DVD is larger than 7.81 GB, but this situation is rare and I’ve never encountered a DVD with a HD Decrypter copy quality of less than 98%.
Note: Do not register your copy of DVDFab, else the HD Decrypter feature will disappear!
Here is a step-by-step tutorial:
1. After installing DVDFab, double click the desktop icon.
2. Click the “Start DVDFab HD Decrypter” button.
3. Make sure that “Full DVD” is selected.
4. Insert a DVD into your computer’s optical drive.
5. After HD Decrypter has finished opening the DVD, note the quality (should be 100%), note the resultant folder size, and then click the “Start” button.
6. After the DVD has completed copying, click “OK” and then “Finish.”
7. Now you are ready to repeat steps 4 through 6 for another DVD.
8. The DVD copies will be in a folder called “…\My Documents\DVDFab\FullDisc,” from which, for example, you can rename the folder to Fire in the Sky (1993) 6.3 and move it to your My Videos\Movies\Docudrama folder.
Caution: Sometimes the default folder name will be something generic such as “DVD Video,” in which case you should move it to your desktop and/or rename it before you copy another DVD that has this same name.
Note: You can also use this technique to copy a DVD to a flash drive, and if you include a portable version of PowerDVD (92.7 MB), you can even watch your favorite DVD on a library computer by carrying an 8 GB flash drive on your key ring!
To play a movie you could first load PowerDVD and then simply drag and drop the movie folder, but then you don’t get the option of displaying the subtitles or the closed captioning.
Here’s a better way to do it:
1. Double click the CyberLink PowerDVD icon.
2. Click the icon in the lower left-hand corner.
3. Select “Open movie file on hard disk drive.”
4. Navigate to the movie’s folder, and select it.
5. Click “OK.”
6. Double click the movie screen to make it full screen.
7. Right click the movie screen in order to select a subtitle or CC option.
1. If you put your movies on external USB hard drives, make sure that they are formatted without compression. Formatting them with compression may actually cause the movies to take up more space, not less, and it can cause them to have files which are not contiguous.
2. When formatting a USB hard drive, if the hard drive has been dropped or banged around, then it's best to format it the slow way. (Do not check “Quick Format.”)
3. If you end up moving the movies from one hard drive to another, and then adding more movies, over and over again, like I did, then you may want to defragment the hard drives. The trouble is, if a hard drive is almost full, then it cannot be defragmented efficiently. Therefore, it is best to have an extra USB hard drive, and to copy all of the movies from one hard drive to another (empty, freshly formatted hard drive). A text file with a name something like “_xcopyHtoE.bat” containing something like the following could be used to do the copying:
To display documentation on the various xcopy options, a .bat file containing the following could be used:
After one USB hard drive has been copied to another, the original hard drive may be erased in a few seconds by doing a “Quick Format.”
Here are instructions for changing the drive letter using “changing drive E to drive H” as an example:
1. “Safely Remove” the original drive H from the computer.
2. Click “Start” / “Control Panel.”
3. Double click “Administrative Tools.”
4. Double click “Computer Management.”
5. Click “Disk Management.”
6. Right click on drive E, selecting “Change Drive Letter and Paths….”
7. Click “Change.”
8. Select “H.”
9. Click “OK,” “Yes” and close the windows.
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