How do I put DVDS on to my hard drive?

QI have a DVD of family occasions that I want to put on my hard drive and then transfer to a USB stick. When I insert the DVD into the disc drive my Windows 10 PC doesn’t give me an option to copy to the hard drive. How can I achieve this?

AWe’re assuming that this is a DVD video disc that you either ‘authored’ yourself or was authored professionally, rather than just a once-blank DVD on to which you’ve burned some video clips? If it is in fact the latter first press Windows key+e to open File Explorer and then just double-click the relevant drive letter, and you’ll see your video files.

However, if it’s a DVD disc that plays in any standard DVD player, then you’ll need to ‘rip’ the contents. As it’s a DVD of family occasions it seems unlikely that it contains any of the copyprotection measures applied to commercial disks, but you never know.

The free DVD Decrypter tool, from www.dvddecrypter.org.uk, is old, but works perfectly. It has the benefit of bypassing some copy-protection systems, should that be necessary. We wouldn’t encourage using this to copy commercial discs, but the content on your DVD is your own family films, so it seems likely that the copyright is yours.

So, pop your DVD in the drive, open DVD Decrypter’s Mode menu and choose IFO. Click the folder icon under the Destination heading and choose a place to store the files ripped from the disc. Now click the Decrypt button.

The ripped video files will be in VOB (video object) format. These won’t be much good for easy playback elsewhere, so convert them to a different video-file type, like the MPEG4 format (with a . mp4 extension). You’ll need different software to do this, such as Handbrake ( https://handbrake.fr). Click the Open Source button followed by ‘Folder (Batch Scan)’ and then select the Destination folder you set in DVD Decrypter. Next, under the Output Settings heading, open the Container dropdown menu and choose MP4 (see screenshot).

You can use the tabs below to tweak the quality of the audio and video, or pick one of the presets from the list on the right-hand side. There’s no point setting the quality higher than 576p and 25 frames per second (fps). That’s as high as will be stored on your DVD.

Click the Browse button next to Destination to set the output folder, type a name for your file and then click Save. Finally, click the Start Encode button and then sit back and wait while Handbrake does its work.