How do I view the DVD`s copied to my hard-disk with DVDshrink??

[KrisMH]

Hello Forum,

I realize this is a "beginners-question" but I still need help.... I have downloaded DVDshrink and it`s VERY good, and I will copy several ov my DVD`s to my harddisk. But how do I view them? They won`t open in windows media player..... Besides, I also want some of them them in my iPad.....what do I do??

Hope someone will answer, please!

[admin]

You can view DVDs stored on your hard-drive, including the ones you make yourself, using the "play from folder" options found in PowerDVD or WinDVD.

Or if you want a free option, you can use Media Player Classic (I recommend getting it as part of a codec pack like the K-Lite Codec Pack), and use the "Play DVD" option (from the "File" menu) to load in your DVD.

All of these above options will play the DVD with the menu intact, as if it were a real disc.

As for iPad playback, there are a couple of options. One is to stream the DVD to the iPad while letting your computer (the "server") re-encode the video in realtime so that it will be in a format that's compatible with the iPad. There are apps to do this, but I'm not too familiar with them.

Or if you simply want to store the movies on the iPad in a compatible format, then you can convert the DVD using a tool like VidCoder, which has built-in conversion profiles for converting from DVDs to iPad/iPad2/iPhone/... you can even use VidCoder to convert Blu-ray movies to an iPad compatible format.

[r0lZ]

Media Player Classic is good to play the DVDs stored on your hard disc (although currently you should install MPC Homecinema), but you can also use several other free programs; for example VLC (VideoLan) and The KMPlayer. Personally, I prefer The KMPlayer. One of its advantages is that you don't need to install a codec pack (always dangerous).

[admin]

Thanks for the additional tips r0lZ, yep I should have stated MPC Homecinema instead, and VLC is a great candidate for "play everything". Do you have any opinions on PotPlayer, which is a new multimedia player apparently from the same author as The KMPlayer:

PotPlayer 1.5.29825 Beta | Software - Digital Digest

I've only played around it briefly, and it looks quite useful (also plays DVDs/ISOs).

[r0lZ]

No, I didn't know that player. I've just downloaded it and will try it. Anyway, KMP is not dead IMO, as they have released an update recently. Not sure why there is a dissident program.

I like KMP mainly because it is the most DVD-Video standard compliant free software player I know, and I use it mainly to verify the DVDs modified with PgcEdit. (In the other hand, VLC is known to have problems when displaying the menu buttons highlights, and MPC is too dependent of the installed codecs to be considered as a good player to test your DVD authoring.)

[EDIT] This thread confirms that VLC is not a good player for DVDs. Seems it selects the audio track to play without taking the content of SPRM 1 into account. And it's probably the most important bug I have ever seen in a software DVD player.

[admin]

I think I read somewhere that the original author of KMP sold it to someone else, and started developing PotPlayer. Could be just a rumour ...

[r0lZ]

I did some rapid tests of PotPlayer. Indeed, it looks like a clone of KMP, and according to the simple tests I did, it is also a good standard compliant player to test your edits.

However, it seems (currently) less stable than KMP. It has crashed in two occasions (I don't know why), and it has trouble with the colors and opacity values of the button highlights. And it doesn't play some animated menus correctly: it hangs on the first images, and you have to kill it.

Also, by default, it doesn't respect the aspect ratio: it stretches the image to fill the window. Curiously, the Aspect Ratio option is set to "free" by default, but the first option in the Aspect Ratio menu is "Fit to video (Recommended)". Selecting that option solves the problem, but it seems that the player doesn't remember it in some circumstances, and resets the setting to "free". Pity!

I haven't tested it with non-DVD video files. And I use only foobar2000 to play my audio files.

It's a new player, so we can hope that the bugs will be fixed soon, but currently I'll keep KMP as my test player (although it has also some bugs).

[admin]

Thanks for taking the time to do the tests, r0lZ.

PotPlayer seems to be updated pretty often, so hopefully the bugs will be ironed out in time.