I have a growing DVD collection, and this consists mostly of series, or related movies, eg, I have most of “The Sopranos”, “Friends”, “Godfather” and other related mobster films.

So, because my DVD’s are mostly series or related, I prefer to burn the original disc to my laptop. That way I can watch it where ever, when ever.

Here is what I do:

1) I burn the DVD to an iso image on my hard drive using DVD Shrink. DVD Shrink is an open source package that rips DVD’s to iso images and supposedly shrinks them too. I say supposedly because the resultant file is still just under 5Gb. In any case, it does a brilliant job of this!

2) I use VideoLan to watch the iso image as if it were a DVD in the drive. VideoLan is maybe one of the best media players I have ever come across. Its simply brilliant. It is also free, open source. This will play movies and mp3′s equally well.

Ok, so that’s all simple enough, but I ran into a problem the other day. A while back I bought the BBC’s Planet Earth series, but I bought it from the USA, so the region encoding on my DVD player is different to the regional encoding on these discs. DVD Shrink was unable to read the disc because of the DVD Region Encoding. VideoLan on the other hand had no problem playing the disc, they seem to automatically bypass the DVD region encoding. This was pretty cool and I was really impressed once again with VLan, but not surprised.

The problem here is that I don’t want to carry my disc’s with me every where I go. Besides being bulky, they’re also expensive. I read about the regional encoding schemes and I was led to believe that there was probably not a great deal I could do. BUT, this did not deter me and I let logic prevail. Logic dictated that the encoding (or rather the result of the encoding) was not purely at the hardware level. There had to be a software level involved, because if it was purely a hardware issue, then not even Vlan would have worked.

After searching around for some time (and even trying to check the registry for the DVD Region Encoding), I came upon DVD Decrypter.  DVD Decrypter allowed me to bypass the region encoding of the DVD’s and rip them to my hard drive as an iso image.

Now, I am able to once again use VideoLAN to watch my DVD’s straight off my laptop.

Next, I will test what happens when I burn those iso images to DVD. Will it have the same encoding as the original disc, or will it be encoding free? Don’t know yet, but watch this space