Record From DVD??? Possible?

[jgalle]

I was wanting to record some movies from DVD onto my pc using snapstream. But before I go buy a DVD player for my PC, has anybody tried this? I am talking of having an internal DVD player playing a mive, and using either snapstream or the software that came with your TV Card to record onto a file. I like having my files on my laptop so I can watch them when I am out of town and all, where-as most of you all want to burn them to DVD...

Just being different, interested in anybody's adventures...

[RobertH]

depending on the manufactuer you may run into a problem called Macrovision. Macrovision is a copy protection method built into most video cards, vcr, and dvd players. It basically makes the video signal unusable if you pass the source from any device into any other device that is capable of recording.

Macrovision is normally seen as the tv image fading in and out or going completly black then back to normal again. It makes capturing dvd's by use of a tv tuner, or a vcr almost impossible, unless your manufactuerer (dvd player) didnt follow the requirements.

You can always try and see if your card will do it

[timgangloff]

You need a dvd ripping utility to accomplish this. check out the useful site at www.dvdrhelp.com.

tim g

[tjdmobile]

Ripping is the only way with an internal DVD-ROM drive, as the drive itself does not have a decoder (depends on PC hardware to accomplish this).

I use a cheap-o Apex and a video swich to accomplish what you desire. I have video feeds from the DVD and the DTV going to the Hauppauge PVR250. It would appear that the PVR250 doesn't have Macrovision enabled on it, because it doesn't suffer the effects I had with my ATI card and Macrovision in the past.

Keep in mind however...most USA DVD's are encoded in 23.9 frames per second. Your DVD player converts this to 29.97 FPS in real time. If you RIP it, it will take a very long time to accomplish (as it needs to be RE-RENDERED to be used with SS, I don't think you can import .VOB files). I shoot home movies on a digital camcorder, and rather than use firewire to import the film, I use my PVR250. Much faster, plus real-time VBR encoding rules.

TJD