Hello - my kids are somewhat rough on our DVD's and I am tired of monkeying around to get the DVD's to play on our laptop computer (they get scratched or have peanut butter smudges on them, etc). I want to just load them on my hard drive or an external hard drive and be able to play them from there. Any suggestions on how to best do this?

I've used DVD Decrypter in the past to make back-up copies of DVDs, but couldn't figure out a way to view the ISO files directly from my hard drive (I still have those ISO files on my hard drive if someone can tell me how to view them).

Thanks for any help you can provide!

well u can use Isobuster to view the iso files.

iv never tried copying my dvd's onto my hard drive so thats as good as my info is gonna get unfortunately.

You'll have to wait for the others to reply

As a father of two boys, I know what your going through....

First, to clean up the DVDs, they have tools/spinners that do that at walmart, kmart, etc. Put scratched disk in, turn the crank a bunch of times, and it comes out good. Not good for long term use however.

PowerISO is another program that you can use to get inside the ISO file. You can also use Nero to just burn the iso, creating another copy of the disk.

You can also use another program to transcode it to divx, so that it takes up only ~700MB. This way you can archive more of them on DVD, or put them on cheaper CDs.

Heres what I do. I use DVD shrink to get them down to 4.7GBs. I make a copy which I let the kids tortur... I mean use. The original go in my room. When disk breaks, I take unused original out, copy, and repeat. This way I only buy the movie once, and I don't have to worry about what happens to the disk.

Read the ISO's from the hard drive using Daemon Tools ( http://www.daemon-tools.cc/dtcc/download.php ) - it shows up as if you had another CD/DVD drive so you can mount ISO's onto it as if you had put a disk in.

Jo

something smells fishey here. the default setup for dvd decryter is - by files -. how did you manage to change the setting? it just seems if your were able to successfully change the setting you would be able to know how to play an .iso image.

i'm going to pass on how to tell you to play an .iso image. sorry pal.

THG has a very complete article on just this topic:

http://www.denguru.com/2006/08/28/ [...] ping_dvds/

Copying comercial DVD's is of questionable legality, as any act which breaks copy-protection is in violation of that ridiculous DMCA...so consider yourself warned.

i do it with the deamon and it works flawlessly, you can mount up to 4 ISO images as CD/DVD-rom drives.

the only problem with them, is that if you use your operateing drive then it will slow down the read speed dramatically, so i recomend useing a second harddrive or an external harddrive.