Taking your DVDs with you…

Tomorrow The Digitante is going on a trip. For this reason, I would like to take some movies with me for the plane ride. The problems I run into when toting along DVDs are as follows:

• The Discs – They can get scratched and broken. Not to mention you have to remember which compartment of your bag you put them in.
• Battery Life – I watch movies using the DVD drive on my laptop. Unfortunately, keeping the DVD drive running for 2 hours straight puts a strain on my battery life. I need to know what happens at the end! Don’t spoil it for me!

In the past, my prime way to combat this problem was to use a  couple of pieces of software to convert my movies to files on my laptop that could be played back off of the hard disk drive which is more battery efficient than the DVD drive. Unfortunately, you had to (as I mentioned) use multiple pieces of software, set up quality and file type, and select which chapters you wanted to include. That is complicated!

Show me the better way

The better way involves a single piece of software called VLC media player. The thing that makes VLC stand out above everyone else out there is that it plays pretty much any format of video or audio you can possibly throw at it. Additionally, the most recent version added the ability to convert your DVDs (or any video file) to a type that will playback on most computers.

The first thing you need to do is download VLC version 1.0 or newer and install it.

Next, you need to pop the DVD in your DVD drive. You can check that it plays by going to the Media menu and clicking Open Disc. In the next screen, make sure your DVD drive is selected and click play. Before clicking play, you might also want to check the box to disable the DVD menu, since we only care about the movie itself.

Now that you’ve verified that you can see your DVD, go back to the Media menu, go further down the list and click Convert/Save. You will see the same screen from before where your DVD drive should still be selected and the DVD menu disabled. Now click the Save/Convert button. The next screen will ask you where you want to save the file, so pick something memorable like a folder called Movies on your Desktop. You also need to select a format. You may want to try a couple different formats to see what one works best with your computer and looks the best on your screen. However, typical formats are the .mov and the .mp4 filetypes. Next you can click Start and the conversion will begin.

How long this process takes will depend on what other things you are doing (the less the faster) and how powerful your computer is. This may be the type of thing you let run over night or while you are at work during the day.

Now for the movies!

You can use VLC to playback the file you just created. Just remember that this is going to create a fairly large file, so unless you have a bunch of hard drive space, consider this a temporary file that you will use when you are on the road and delete later if you need more hard disk drive space. Additionally, the quality of the movie is not going to be quite as good as the DVD would look, but should still work fine.

If you need help getting started on converting some movies, or would like a walk-through of how to do each of these steps, feel free to contact The Digitante by heading to the About page and sending me an email or giving me a call.