[lack of clever title]

November 23, 2005 9:05 AM

I have a dvd that I made with iDVD on my mac. I show it regularly (10+ times), daily on a Dell. How do I create a file on the Dell that looks and plays like the dvd, but is actually playing from the hard drive?

Just to make it more difficult - I don't have any software for the Dell. Well nothing that it didn' t come with anyway. I can download some stuff, but would prefer not to pay (shareware not h4x0r).

posted by jmgorman to Computers & Internet (13 answers total)

I can't tell you how to do this on a PC, but on OS X it's quite simple to create a disk image of a DVD and then mount it such that the OS (and thus every app) treats it as an actual loaded DVD. There should be some software for Windows that will do this.
posted by tweebiscuit at 9:07 AM on November 23, 2005

Response by poster: well, that's kinda the rub. I need to do this on a PC.
posted by jmgorman at 9:32 AM on November 23, 2005

Create an image file (ISO or BIN/CUE) using a free DVD-R recording program. I use Nero (not free), but there are promising looks apps here.

To play the image file, use VLC.
posted by Yogurt at 9:33 AM on November 23, 2005

Or instead of VLC, you could mount the image file as though it were an imaginary DVD drive using Daemon Tools (free) and play it like any real DVD.
posted by Yogurt at 9:35 AM on November 23, 2005

The folks at doom9.net have a web page dedicated to this task.
posted by bachelor#3 at 9:42 AM on November 23, 2005

Can create an ISO image of the DVD (there are a ton of PC programs which will do that). Then daemon tools on the PC is a very neat utility which emulates a CD or DVD drive -- you give it the ISO image and that image then appears as if it were a real CD/DVD.
posted by littleme at 9:54 AM on November 23, 2005

Best answer: The built-in DVD player on Mac OS X can read a VIDEO_TS folder just fine. The built-in DVD player performs much better on my iMac than VLC, so I'd do that. So just copy the VIDEO_TS folder to your Mac's hard drive.

To make an image of the DVD for the Dell, use Applications>Utilities>Disk Utility.app. When I put in an unencrypted DVD, I can do File>New Disk Image From DVD. Make sure to change the type to a DVD/CD master.

You can play this on Windows with VLC or Mplayer or maybe even WMP.
posted by teece at 9:58 AM on November 23, 2005

Yeah, go for teece's solution instead of using Daemon Tools (or something else) -- Disk Utility is rock solid, and comes with OS X.
posted by tweebiscuit at 10:43 AM on November 23, 2005

Word of caution - itunes hates Daemon tools, in my experience
posted by DrtyBlvd at 11:41 AM on November 23, 2005

Get DVD-Decrypter

change mode to IFO

Rip to some folder on the hard drive

You can play from here with VLC/WinDVD

--OR--

get AutoGK

point input file to the directory you selected above

type in the file you want to make (it'll be an .avi)

Set the file size, 700mb/hour is high quality, so if your video is 15 minutes, set it to 175mb.

Click Add Job, then Start

You can now play with any movie player that supports .avi, and you can send it over the network, or even post it on a web site.

Play around with the file sizes.... Compression shouldn't take too long, and you can make files with different compression and compare.
posted by hatsix at 12:39 PM on November 23, 2005

I know this has already been answered, but I use ISO files of the DVD created with DVDshrink (you don't have to actually recompress or anything), mounted on a virtual drive using Alcohol
posted by pompomtom at 2:34 PM on November 23, 2005

Ahem. All the above answers are needlessly complicated. You made it in iDVD, so there won't be answer ensryption/region restrictions. So just drag the VIDEO_TS folder from the DVD to your windows desktop. Then use whatever DVD software came with the Dell to play the folder.

Or google for VLC, and use that if you don't have any software.
posted by ascullion at 3:51 PM on November 23, 2005

Yep, just copy over the VIDEO_TS folder, preserving its contents. Simple. If your DVD player software doesn't support the "open file on HD" feature, get one that does. Media Player Classic and VLC are both open source and free (in both the "free beer" and "freedom" senses of the word) players that can do this.
posted by Rhomboid at 7:17 PM on November 23, 2005