I'm trying to copy my personal library of DVD & Blue Ray movies I have purchased & own into my iDevice for my private personal viewing & entertainment. Does anyone do this & if so, how? What accessible software do you use to accomplish the task? I understand one way is to copy from a DVD drive to my PC & then transfer to iTunes & then transfer to an iDevice. Is there a simpler way to perform this task? Also is there a way to transfer movies to some other type of device & then hook it up to an iDevice (iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, etc.) to view movies? Obviously the device & operating system would have to be accessible though. I appreciate any insight, suggestions & advice anyone can provide. Thank you.
Comments
A tedious process
You haven't mentioned which platform you're on, so this may not be helpful. My primary desktop platform is Windows 7.
First of all, it is impossible to copy a DVD without software that will decrypt the disk for you. I use AnyDVD, but I had heard that it is going to be discontinued (I can't remember the source or know if it was accurate). It allows you to copy files from the DVD using standard file copy methods, and its configuration interface is accessible as far as I remember. Copying a DVD without decrypting it will generally only result in either read errors or a copy that only shows a message about the DVD having been copied.
Second, I don't believe iTunes will let you simply transfer DVDs to an iOS device, so it would need to be converted to the .m4v format. I don't know an application with good accessibility for doing this, but I used the command-line version of Handbrake which actually slowed down my screenreader (NVDA) significantly from the frequent refreshes of the status line. I also discovered that some of the results were less than ideal and seem to suffer from poor streaming performance with iTunes home sharing compared with iTunes purchases.
Third, I don't believe it is possible to get video files into the Videos app of an iOS device without using iTunes. You may be able to use a 3rd party media player to play your videos, but I have little experience with those.
Overall, the process is incredibly tedious, especially if you have a lot of movies to convert. I didn't even try converting the TV shows I have on DVD.
transferring movies to i-device
I hear dropbox is an easy way to do this.
There is a dropbox app in the appstore.
Should work for movies or any other file.