Saving Personal DVDs to Computer Freeware Needed

cjwct

SatelliteGuys Pro
Original poster
Jul 2, 2006
1,598
8
Glastonbury, CT
What is a freeware program which would allow me to take my old DVDs and save them to my computer hard drive? Preferably a no frills, easy to use program . . . thank you!
 
ImgBurn is free and it will duplicate DVDs. You can read them into an .iso file and burn as many copies as you want. But, of course if they are commercial movie discs they probably have copy protection on them, there are a lot of programs around on the internet that run about $20 to break the protection.

The Official ImgBurn Website
 
If your DVD's have no copy protection, you can use most video editing software to "import" the movie file to the timeline and then render it out to a file that will stream on your system. I have taken many of my TV shows I produced and originally burned to DVD; the *.VOB file is imported to the timeline and then rendered to a WMV file that plays on my xbox360 over my ethernet. I use Sony Vegas for this and it works very well, fast and quality is excellent. Many of the file conversion freebees I've tried are loaded with artifacts and have render quality issues.
 
Thanks everyone for your suggestions. I should have been more specific because I am looking to stream them as 1 file (each dvd would be 1 file) to stream through the PS3
 
When streaming over the network with devices other than a computer doing the playback you have no choice but remove DVD DRM (Macrovision, region, CSS) to make this work. If the DVDs are old (like you said), DVD Schrink will be all you need: it will strip the protection and save the movie as one file.

Diogen.
 
freeware solutions... DVD43 for decrypting and fixing the intentional errors in the disc and DVDShrink for breaking them down and removing the stupid menus and other crap.
 
freeware solutions... DVD43 for decrypting and fixing the intentional errors in the disc and DVDShrink for breaking them down and removing the stupid menus and other crap.

DVD43 and Shrink have been unable to work with most Sony discs for some time now.