I get asked this question a lot: “How can I play my DVDs on my _____ (insert device name)?” Well, here’s how:
Overview:
- Rip your DVDs to your hard drive
- If needed, convert your DVDs to the format that will work with your device
Step 1: Rip your DVDs to your hard drive
- Download and install DVDFab (the trial version is fine)
- When you start DVDFab, it will tell you it is the trial version (which is fine… we’ll be using HD Decrypter, which is free)
- Click the “Start DVDFab” button on the “Please Register” window
- Insert your DVD and let DVDFab analyze it
- Choose a target (a folder in our case), label the output (usually the name of the DVD) and decide if you want DVDFab to shrink your DVD output file (usually I choose DVD5)
(click image to zoom)
- Click “Start” and it should rip the DVD to your Target Folder
- When it is done, browse to your target folder and you will see a “FullDisc” subfolder. Open the “FullDisc” folder and voila! The contents of your DVD are right there! (the AUDIO_TS and VIDEO_TS subfolders will be within the folder that represents your DVD)
But how do I play it on my computer?
To play the movie from your hard drive when it is in this format, you’ll need a program that can read VIDEO_TS and AUDIO_TS folders:
- Download and install VLC
- Start VLC and go to Media > Open Folder
- Browse to your movie’s folder (in my case “Charly”) to the point where you see your AUDIO_TS and VIDEO_TS subfolders and click “Select Folder”
- Your DVD will now play from your hard drive! Use your mouse to select the DVD menus.
- You can also hover over the buttons at the bottom of the VLC window to see what they do (e.g. Full Screen, fast forward, next chapter, etc)
Step 2: Convert your DVDs to the format you want to play on your _____ (iPad or iPhone or whatever)
So, you want to play this movie on your iPad, iPhone, TouchPad, or just make it into a single media file so you don’t have to use VLC? No problem!
- Download and install Handbrake
- Start Handbrake and set a default output folder – ‘Tools’ menu > ‘Options’ > ‘General’ tab > ‘Default Path’ (set it to your desktop or something)
- Click the “Source” drop down and choose “Folder” (since our DVD is now contained in a folder on our hard drive
- Browse to the VIDEO_TS folder and select it
- Handbrake will analyze the folder and automatically pick the entire movie (instead of the bonus features, for example)
- On the right pane choose your format (e.g. for HP TouchPad and iPads choose “iPad”, for iPhone choose “iPhone”, if you just want a single media file choose “Normal”)
- You can tweak all sorts of settings. For most of us choosing a default format is fine
- Click “Start” and it will start converting.
- That’s it! You should now be able to drag and drop your newly created media file onto your HP TouchPad (when connect via USB) or into iTunes so it can sync with you iPad or onto your network share so you can play it with XBMC (okay, I haven’t tried this with XBMC, instead I drag the entire movie folders onto my network share and XBMC plays the DVD from the folder. I do this because I want XBMC to play my movies as if they were true DVDs, not media files).
But I don’t want to convert my DVD folders (the video_ts and audio_ts folders) to be a single media file. I want to play my DVDs from these folders but the folders are too big, what do I do?
Running out of hard drive space, eh? Well, you can shrink your VIDEO_TS and AUDIO_TS folders even more by using
DVDShrink (you can’t download it from DVDShrink.org, you have to download it from somewhere else).
Once you have DVDShrink loaded, you can compress your VIDEO_TS and AUDIO_TS folders even more to save on hard drive space.
