DVD files

Originally posted by HAVOC
What are you trying to do? PS2 seems like a long way around to be backing up DVDs. Your PC is a far better choice for a lot of reasons.

Click to expand...

First of all, I have a PSP, NOT a PS2. PSP's are designed to do many things besides just play games. They also play movies using a proprietary DVD or things you have downloaded from your computer. They can play MP3 files and also store digital images from your digital camera.

It seems silly to me to be buying these DVD movies that can only be played on the PSP (Standard DVD players can't play them-they don't fit). Rather than do that, I thought I would dispense with buying them altogether, and when I want to watch a movie on it, instead download it from my computer (after ripping it from the DVD) to the PSP's memory card. Presto, the memory card performs the same function the PSP DVD would have done, except that now I don't have these wierd DVD's hanging around, and I can watch any movie from my DVD collection on the PSP. I would then effectively have a portable, battery operated DVD player.

I have the software to do it, in theory, but what I'm not sure about is whether this is feasible without overwhelming the memory card. 3.5 gigs for a small movie is a lot of data. I was kind of hoping the file would be smaller. On the other hand, I have noticed that with the PSP and proprietary DVD's, unlike a standard DVD player, there is no provision for a zoom command, leading me to wonder if this might be because the video resolution is optimized for the PSP's 2x3 inch screen with no provision for zoom in order to shrink the file size to something smaller. After all, the DVD's it plays are physically smaller than a standard one, and there is no need in making them to worry about making them look good on a big screen TV. Is my thought process making sense here, or am I trying to do the impossible?

OK, I gotcha now...

You can reduce DVDs to all sorts of small sizes, with a loss in quality of course (just like the loss you have whan you use those oddball Sony PSP disks). With some work you can jam a DVD onto a CD. It'd look OK on the PSP, but as for playing it on a TV somewhere... prolly look like crap.

First question... what formats can the PSP handle? I doubt it can mount a DVD image you have on a Memory Stick. If it can't, you'd have to extract the base video file into a file format the PSP understands.

Problem is, to make an .mpg or .avi or other "standard" file from a DVD you need to do manipulations to break the CSS encryption that are technically illegal. Software to do it is readily available, but you'll have to go find it yourself, linking to it is a violation of GT's ToS (for that matter, mentioning it might be, but I'll give it a shot).

Copying the file is not neccessarily illegal.

Breaking the encryption is.

Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA)

Chapter 12

Paragraph 1201 Circumvention of copyright protection systems
‘‘(2) No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public,
provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service,
device, component, or part thereof, that-
‘‘(A) is primarily designed or produced for the purpose
of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls
access to a work protected under this title;
‘‘(B) has only limited commercially significant purpose or
use other than to circumvent a technological measure that
effectively controls access to a work protected under this title;
or
‘‘(C) is marketed by that person or another acting in concert
with that person with that person’s knowledge for use in circumventing
a technological measure that effectively controls
access to a work protected under this title.
‘‘(3) As used in this subsection-
‘‘(A) to ‘circumvent a technological measure’ means to
descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work,
or otherwise to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair
a technological measure, without the authority of the copyright
owner; and
‘‘(B) a technological measure ‘effectively controls access to
a work’ if the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation,
requires the application of information, or a process or a treatment,
with the authority of the copyright owner, to gain access
to the work.

The DMCA is a complete turd, and in courts for various reasons, but decrypting DVDs is technically a violation.

Originally posted by HAVOC
Problem with DVD Shrink is you still have a DVD image when you're done. I don't think the PSP is smart enough to mount a DVD image that shows up on a Memory Stick. If you could find a way to burn the PSP format (UMD?), then you could do DVD Shrink to reduce size and use the burner to make PSP native discs.

Click to expand...

Almost, but not quite. UMD's media appears identical to a DVD (except in miniature) on visual inspection except that the "DVD" is mounted inside a small plastic case from which it is not intended to be removed. It compares to a standard DVD much as a 3.5 inch floppy disk compares to the 5.5 inch type floppy disk. If you could directly burn a UMD, you would the need to have a casing to put it in.

The software I have advertises itself as capable of making the conversion to a file the PSP can use if supported by appropriate hardware (ie DVD ROM on computer). I guess the sticking point here is the question of how big a file will the DVD movie be when the program gets done doing it's thing (The program literature does not say). I guess I may need to buy the DVD ROM to find out. It's an upgrade I needed to do anyway, but it's too bad I apparantly have to do it before I can find out if the memory card can handle it.