Playing dvd's without the disc

Joined
Mar 9, 2004
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I know that I can use dvd decrypter to get an iso image of the dvd itself, but I have more dvds than hd space. I figure that since mpeg2 is pretty old it should be possible to recompress it into a newer lossless format and do the same with all of the sound tracks as I'm sure they're uncompressed wavs.

Now I know this is possible if I was content with using some codecs that removed the dvd menus and played in a media player, but I would like to maintain the dvd menus and everthing in a simple single iso image and still be able to play the thing easily by mounting the iso image on my computer. (I know this makes the image useless for home dvd players and my nice intervideo mpeg2 decompressor, but the codec I used for the video should handle it from there, right?)

What do all the dvd freaks do with seasons of tv series that dont like losing the menus and swapping dvds all the time? Buy more hds?

Thanks for any input.
 
Buy more hard drives on sale at great prices :) or drop 110 on a 320 gig sata @ newegg.com wd sata makes a nice fast storage drive , even if you leave them @ full 8 gigs or so which are what most max out at, thats 40 discs, 110 bucks to backup 40 discs is pretty decent

and keep a constant watch on www.techbargains.com www.slickdeals.net www.dealmein.net

also you can use clonedvd to compress the images they can be compressed from vobs, mounted images or iso files, and then have it save as an iso, or burn, it works really well, usually only takes 25-30 minutes per dvd on a single core 2.8-3.0 P4 HT. using clonedvd will get them all down to 4.5 gigs for burn with a single layered dvd, and you can burn them for back up too. You can also rip out extras or alternate languages to keep teh quality as high as possible. And when you compress cartoons like family guy, its much smaller and you see less compression artifacts simply because it is a cartoon and theres is much more large blocks of color.

Edit: mind you this keeps them in normal dvd format, so you can burn them compressed like this too, to keep them backed up on 4.5 gig single layer dvds, and they are easily mountable.
 
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