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VLC Media Player Tutorial #11 –
How to Save a Backup Copy of Your DVDs

VLC Media Player is an astonishing free media player which is gaining a lot of popularity and it may be truly called to be the Swiss Army knife of multimedia applications. VLC is able of playing almost any file you may think of, it also can do so much more. So, let me take you in a tour to one of the handiest tasks you can carry out with VLC which is making a copy of your DVDs to your hard drive.

Have you got VLC Media Player installed and running on your computer? No? Well, go to the top of this page and click on the big blue “Download” button, the InstallIQ™ installation manager will take care of the rest.

Why copying a DVD to your hard drive?
Well, it's a simple answer, to have a backup copy of your treasured movies that will not suffer the wear and tear optical discs are prone to. As a plus you can carry your favorite movies in the hard disk of your laptop/notebook and play them during a trip at much lower power consumption compared with DVD playing. Chances are that you think that to decently copy your own DVDs to your computer's HDD you have to spend a lot of money in a professional DVD copying program, well nothing can be farther from truth, VLC Media Player is capable of copying DVDs simply and easily.

Note: This tutorial is not intended for illegal copy of DRM protected DVDs (which VLC has not the capability to do) but to copy your own personal unprotected DVDs into your computer's hard drive and for personal use only.

Hands on!
To start with, insert the DVD into your DVD drive and open it with Media > Open Disc.

It is necessary that you find the title to copy from the DVD, to do so you've got to preview the titles from the DVD one by one. So, start with Title number set in 0 and go up a number at a time until you find the title you desire to get copied into your HDD.

Notice that it can be faster to check the No DVD menus in the Disc Selection section this will make only actual video titles available.

Now that the right title is found you have to select a folder or location to save the copy and enter a name for it. To do so, go to the “Play” button, unfold the menu and select “Convert”

This will lead you to the next step, click on the “Browse” button in the Destination section and the following browser window will appear, there you have to write name and extension of the file, this will determine the container format. For this example I chose OGG format because I find it more convenient.

Click OK and you're back on the setting section you can select a different preset profile or even set a new one by clicking on the tools icon next to the menu. This aspect is the same we discussed in our previous tutorial on how to transcode video/audio files using VLC here: http://gofree.com/Tutorials/VLCTranscoding.php

You can also select to Display the output while copying.

These choices are up to you, and if you don't have any specific format in mind I would highly recommend to leave all parameters in their default factory settings, nevertheless, if you are aiming for a particular mobile device, maybe you desire to choose a difference encapsulation method and codec. Click the “Start” button once you've finished with the adjustments.

So sit back sip your favorite beverage and enjoy while VLC copies your favorite DVDs.

Final Words

As you can see copying your DVDs into your HDD is dead easy and it only requires free VLC Media Player to be installed and running on your computer. Download VLC right now by clicking on the “Download Now” link below and start copying your DVDs right away, satisfaction guaranteed!!

Clicking this Download button starts InstallIQ™, it manages yourVLC installation. Learn More VLC software is available for free at VideoLAN's website as well.