Holiday Tip: Store your DVDs on your Notebook

I always take my notebook with me when I go on holidays with my family or friends to make sure that I can update and administrate my websites during that time. I also like to take a few of my DVDs with me to be able to watch them when there is nothing else to do, nothing beats watching a DVD on a rainy day in my opinion.

Everyone would now assume that I would take the DVDs and their cases with me but this is not the case. I came up with a method that would add all DVDs that I wanted to view to the hard drive of my notebook which meant that I did not have to stuff the DVDs somewhere securely to make sure they would not break during the journey.

RatDVD is a DVD compressor that creates playable compressed versions of DVDs including all the extras such as subtitles, menus and goodies. The size is usually between 1 and 2 Gigabytes even when converting DVD-9 disks. If you would just copy the DVD onto your hard drive the size would be between 4,5 and 8 Gigabytes of data usually.

It is possible to add ten or even twenty compressed DVDs to your hard drive making this a very effective way to take a lot of movies with you on your holidays.

Another aspect that should not be overlooked is the fact that you can play the DVDs in compressed form with many video players which means that you do not have to unpack them before watching the movie.

You might be asking about the difference between using RatDVD and a converter that would rip the file into divx or a comparable format. This is indeed a good question. RatDVD files are larger but contain all the extras that have been placed on the original DVD as well while most other formats do not add those extras to the conversion.

The output quality will only be equal if you use a high enough bitrate and resolution for the divx conversion which in turn increases the file size again.

I would still suggest to use RatDVD because it is in my opinion much easier to handle than most video converters. Just select a compatible file, click on DVD > RatDVD and let RatDVD do the rest. That’s a two click conversion of a DVD.

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