Ricky Says

DVD movies that you buy or rent can be viewed on your computer using a number of DVD player programs, but there are a few downsides to this approach - especially for laptop users who travel a lot:

1. Battery life on laptops is greatly reduced by the mechanical spinning of the DVD drive.

2. It's a pain to swap out DVD discs for each movie, let alone pack the discs along if you're on a vacation or business trip.

3. The spinning DVD drive is noisy and can be annoying for passengers sitting next to you.

For these reasons, it's often desirable to convert each DVD movie to an electronic format so they can be viewed as videos. This approach lets you store several videos on your hard and play them as often as you like without having to swap out DVD discs. Your battery life will also be a lot longer, because you won't have to keep a DVD drive spinning to watch the videos.

Converting commercial movies into video format requires software that's able to crack the copy-protection and convert the movie into common digital video formats, such as Quicktime's .mp4/.mov format, or Windows Media's .wmv format.

Getting Started

In this article I'll show you 5 easy steps for converting copy-protected DVD movies into videos using Wondershare's DVD Ripper Platinum program. You'll be able to convert your movies into numerous formats for viewing them on your computer as well as mobile devices like the iPhone, PSP, Zune and even an Apple TV.

To get started, download Wondershare for Windows (also available for Mac) from their website and follow along with the steps below:

Five Easy Steps for Ripping DVD Movies

1. Install and start Wondershare DVD Ripper Platinum, and insert the DVD movie into your disc drive.

Question: I am trying to put some movies onto my Sansa Fuze, but I don't know how to go about doing this. Every time that i try, the file is either to big or something. Please tell me how to do this. Thanks you for your time.

Many people pay an extra $10 - $15 a month for a DVR to record TV shows and movies and view them later.

Did you know you could be recording TV and cable shows directly to your computer for free?

All you need is an audio/video capture adapter that plugs into your computer's USB port, like the EasyCAP USB2.0 Video Capture VHS-to-USB Adapter. Once you've hooked the adapter up between your TV and your computer, you'll be able to record any show directly to your computer in a digital video format of your choice (avi, mpeg, wmv, etc).

You can also edit the videos to remove commercials, and can even transfer these videos to your iphone or other mobile device to view them on the go.

Here's what the adapter looks like, with cables that will plug into your TV's RCA or S-Video jacks on one end, and into your computer's USB port on the other end:

The USB end plugs into your computer, and the RCA jacks plug into your TV, VCR, or cable box.

The adapter comes with Ulead Movie Maker software that you'll run on your PC. With the software running, you'll click "Video Capture" when your TV show or movie comes on and the show will be saved to your computer in high quality digital video and audio.

Yes, this adapter could also be used to make backup copies of your DVD or VHS movies (just be sure to honor any copyright laws that may exist in your country).

My wife and I bought a Sony Handycam about a decade ago, to capture video of our kids as they grew up. It records on Hi-8 video cassettes, and I needed a way to convert these analog recordings into digital movies and save them to DVD.

The Sony Handycam (model number CCD-TRV22) has RCA outputs for video and mono audio, and I found an EasyCAP USB2.0 Video Capture VHS-to-USB Adapter that converts the analog Hi-8 recordings into digital movies.

The Easycap adapter plugs into the RCA jacks on the Sony Handycam (I used the white line for the single audio jack), and the USB jack plugs into my laptop. Also bundled with the adapter is a licensed copy of ULead Video Studio 8.0 for creating and editing movies.

I had to use an RCA patch cable between the female adapter jacks and the camcorder, just like you would between a VCR and your TV. In fact, this adapter could also be hooked up to a VHS VCR (yep, I still have one), to make digital copies of old VHS movies.

Once I hooked up the camcorder with my laptop using the EasyCap usb adapter, I ran the Ulead Movie Wizard software and selected the "Capture" menu.

I put the camcorder in Player mode, loaded the video tape and pressed play. Then I pressed "Capture Video" in the Ulead program, and received an error indicating that no input signal could be found.

The reason was the video capture options are set by default to record from Video Tuner and I was using a video camcorder with RCA (composite) outputs. I clicked "Options" and then selected "Video and Audio Capture Property Settings" to change this setting:

Have a video you've recorded that you're proud of or that you'd like to share with friends and family?

This article will show you how to connect your camcorder to your PC, copy your recording to your computer, make a movie and publish it to YouTube or BlipTV - all using free software that's already bundled with Windows XP or Vista.

The only thing you'll need to buy (if you don't have one already) is a Firewire DV cable that will connect your camcorder to your computer. Once connected, you can easily make movies out of them using free tools that are built into Windows.

You can also make backup copies of your miniDV digital video cassettes on your computer and burn them to a DVD, or convert them into mp4 video format and transfer them to your iPod or iPhone.

Connect your Camcorder to your Computer

I own a Canon ZR800 digital camcorder, which is a very popular model that takes great videos using standard MiniDV cassettes. I recently took some video of my 10-year-old daughter's talent show she did with 3 of her friends at school, and several other mothers wanted a copy of the video.