Question about transferring DVDs to video iPods

[topolina]

Sorry if this has been asked already, but do any of you know of a LEGAL way to transfer DVDs onto a video ipod? It seems like it should work the same way as downloading CDs...

Thanks!

- topo

[ryanhellyer]

I assume Ipods use the MP4 format for videos. I don't know of any good DVD to MP4 converters, but there are a selection of video converters at Major Geeks which may be able to help. There should definitely be a converter from DVD to some sort of standard AVI format. There seem to be a lot of AVI to MP4 converters available - one cam pre-packaged with an MP4 player I bought a while ago.

[topolina]

Awesome, thanks!

You guys have the answers to all my questions Such a great resource!

- topo

[ryanhellyer]

Does that mean you have managed to get this to work?


Oh, and in general copying DVD's to your Ipod is definitely not illegal anywhere (that I know of). However 99% of all DVD's you would ever want to transfer to your Ipod will be copy protected, so you will usually (depends on what country you are in) need to own the DVD you are copying from. In some countries (including New Zealand, where I am) it is illegal to backup/copy protected videos at all. However I suspect this doesn't stop most people.

[topolina]

Yes, I got it to work after doing some tinkering

It seemed odd to me that it'd be illegal to download videos you already owned to a video ipod, but people kept telling me that it was because of some encryption problems (?) Someone told me it was just Apple's way of getting you to buy more stuff from itunes.

Thanks for the info! It was really helpful.

[ryanhellyer]

Good to hear you've got it working I forgot to mention that if you have a Mac with QuickTime Pro on it, you can probably do it with that as AFAIK they have native support for DVD and MP4. You may need to decrypt the DVD first though. There's a very good program called DVD decryptor for doing this.

Originally Posted by topolina

It seemed odd to me that it'd be illegal to download videos you already owned to a video ipod, but people kept telling me that it was because of some encryption problems (?)

Almost all commercial DVD's are encrypted. Whatever software you are using will include a DVD decrypter to decode the video. This is illegal in some countries, but in most it is fine.

Originally Posted by topolina

Someone told me it was just Apple's way of getting you to buy more stuff from itunes.

Partially. Since it is illegal in some places to copy and/or decrypt 'most' DVD's, they don't make it easy for you. Also, to include the software to convert the files directly, they would need to purchase encoding licenses for that software. However many web sites don't seem to have issues providing this software for free - I'm not sure how they get away with this, but there doesn't seem to be any legal ramifications for them.

Selling more stuff on iTunes is just a (very good) motivation not to make it easy for you to copy your videos onto your iPod.


You may find that some DVD's are not possible to convert. I'm finding these are becoming more common over time which is quite annoying. If you do some googling you can usually find ways around this for particular movies, but I find the hassle isn't worth the effort.

[topolina]

I have a PC, so no worries- I had to do it the hard way

Do you know if once you purchase a movie from itunes you can then burn it somehow onto a DVD? As you can probably tell, I'm cheap and hate the idea of spending $15 to (a) download a movie I already own, or (b) download a movie I can only watch once on the ipod.



Thanks!

[ryanhellyer]

Originally Posted by topolina

Do you know if once you purchase a movie from itunes you can then burn it somehow onto a DVD?

I'm not sure what format iTunes video downloads are in but I'm guessing MP4, in which case yes, it is possible. I don't know of any software off the top of my head that can do it, but is definitely something which you can do.

You may need to convert from MP4 to AVI and then on to DVD. I've converted many files from AVI to DVD and vice versa and I've converted from AVI to MP4. But I've never gone from MP4 to AVI or DVD, but if you can go one way, I assume the reverse is just as easy.


MajorGeeks.com is usually the best place to look for software like that, although some software used for these tasks is legally dubious as they sometimes use pirated software embedded inside them to do the conversion. There are paid softwares available for it, but I haven't bothered with any of them as there are usually free alternatives which can do the job fine.

There is some loss in quality when you convert between formats though, so your DVD's will likely not be as good quality as the originals. I used to live in Canada and while there wanted to show some friends a bunch of New Zealand movies, but they weren't available anywhere in Canada or online on DVD. Since I couldn't access them any other way, I went through the long winded method of downloading them via P2P. Then converted them from DIVX to DVD, the loss in quality of 2x700 MB files (feature length movie) converted to DVD wasn't noticeable on the junky mono 25" CRT TV we had, but I assume that on a better system there would be a noticeable difference.


Or go buy a Mac and install QuickTime Pro I think you can do this all quite easily with that combination - or at least I'm 99% certain you can. Windows machines are pretty awful for any video manipulation tasks unfortunately.

[BigAlReturns]

Originally Posted by ryanhellyer

I'm not sure what format iTunes video downloads are in but I'm guessing MP4, in which case yes, it is possible. I don't know of any software off the top of my head that can do it, but is definitely something which you can do.

Are iTunes videos not in iPod size though, so would they not look rubbish if scaled up to real size.

[ryanhellyer]

Originally Posted by BigAlReturns

Are iTunes videos not in iPod size though, so would they not look rubbish if scaled up to real size.

According to apple.com they're 640x480 which is plenty good enough for most TV's. They claim they are "near DVD quality", which should be good enough to satisfy most viewers, albeit will lose some quality on higher resolution, better quality TV's and sound systems.