copying home made DVD's to hard drive

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hellman@stanford.edu - 30 Mar 2007 07:12 GMT

Hard drives are getting cheap enough that I'd like to copy the roughly
50 hours of home video I've created to an external HDD and be able to
scan through or play the videos from the HDD. I have the videos both
on mini-DV tapes and on home made (i.e., not copy protected) DVD's. At
roughly 15 GB/hour the mini-DV tapes are still a bit expensive to
copy, plus I think I'd have to load each mini-DV tape into iMovie and
then create a QT movie (full resolution) from it -- a non-trivial
amount of work. (Please correct me if I'm wrong here or later!)

So I am planning instead on using the lower resolution (and 2nd
generation) DVD's. I also realize that DVD video is much less amenable
to later editing due to its use of reference frames. But, it's more
like 4 GB/hour at the settings I used, which makes a big difference.

My question: What's the best way to do this? Here's what I've tried/
know (or think I know) so far:

I tried copying one DVD as a disk image (.dmg) to the HDD, but when I
double clicked the .dmg file, it took quite a while for my Mac to
mount the disk image -- much longer than I'd like for scanning, etc.

Worse, I couldn't get DVD player to play the mounted disk image once
it was mounted. I did get "MPlayer OS X" (an app I must have
downloaded some time ago and forgotten about) to play each of the
four .VOB files that the DVD was apparently broken into, but I
couldn't fast forward or reverse. This may be due to the version of
Mplayer that I have being too old.

As suggested in a 2002 posting on this group, I tried using DVD
Player's Open command to tell it to play the disk image, but choosing
the _TS folder didn't work, and I couldn't even choose the lower
level .VOB files that did work (albeit poorly) with MPlayer.

I suspect that I don't want to create a disk image (too long to
mount), but rather just drag the _TS folder from the DVD to my HDD.
But then, how to play it?

Thanks in advance for any help.

Martin

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hellman@stanford.edu - 31 Mar 2007 06:40 GMT

On Mar 29, 11:12 pm, hell...@stanford.edu wrote:

> I tried copying one DVD as a disk image (.dmg) to the HDD, but when I
> double clicked the .dmg file, it took quite a while for my Mac to
> mount the disk image -- much longer than I'd like for scanning, etc.
>
> Worse, I couldn't get DVD player to play the mounted disk image once
> it was mounted.

I have some new information, and some new questions. It turns out DVD
player will play the disk image once it's mounted if I use File/Open
DVD Media (CMND-O) and then select the VIDEO_TS file which is the only
folder off the mounted disk image. But I have to click the PLAY icon,
which takes me to the menu on the DVD (just one option), and then
click the ENTER icon. If I click the PLAY icon twice, nothing happens
-- which is what I tried before.

Also, contrary to the first time I mounted the disk image (when it
took a long time to mount the disk image), this second time, the disk
image mounted very quickly -- maybe because it had already been
verified?

Which leaves two questions on which I'd appreciate help:

1. Will the long delay in mounting disk images occur only the first
time I mount the disk? Will that delay occur each time a new computer
mounts the disk image? (The disk image is on an external hard drive.)

2. If, instead of creating a disk image of the DVD, I merely create a
folder with the DVD's name and then drag the VIDEO_TS file and all its
contents there, will DVD Player still play it? If later, I want to
make a copy of the DVD, will dragging the VIDEO_TS file and all its
contents to a blank DVD-R (e.g., in Roxio Toast) create a playable
DVD? Basically, I'm asking here about the relative advantages of
making disk images of the DVD's vs. merelycopying their files.

Many thanks for any help.

Martin

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Warren Oates - 31 Mar 2007 11:02 GMT

> 1. Will the long delay in mounting disk images occur only the first
> time I mount the disk? Will that delay occur each time a new computer
> mounts the disk image? (The disk image is on an external hard drive.)

Did you try clicking the "skip" button while it was verifying?

> 2. If, instead of creating a disk image of the DVD, I merely create a
> folder with the DVD's name and then drag the VIDEO_TS file and all its
[quoted text clipped - 3 lines]
> DVD? Basically, I'm asking here about the relative advantages of
> making disk images of the DVD's vs. merelycopying their files.

Yes. You'll need to use the Data/DVD-Rom UDF format in older versions of
Toast to make copies this way; newer versions have a "Video/Video_TS
Folder" option.

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W. Oates

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Mac Forum / Applications / Mac Applications / March 2007

copying home made DVD's to hard drive