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We use the free software download DVD Shrink 3.2 to copy our DVDs, via a non-Mac laptop, onto a Western Digital "Passport" hard drive. These we then watch while away on a laptop, we don't have a TV but we have been told that a TV with USB will allow this.
The 3 Passport hard drives we have are about 3 years old and have been excellant. They get their power from the USB cable, so don't need another power cable as many do. A 1 terabyte version from Argos is currently £70. We have two 250Gb and one 500Gb for all our films, photos we take, everything. I would get two and duplicate what you copy for the costs involved perhaps, in case one stopped?
The only down side is the length of time it takes to copy. Some are 15 minutes, most are 45, one was 3 hours! The laptop is also 3 years old so maybe a newer one would be quicker?
Hope that helps a little.
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Thanks so much for your help. Having the hardrive receive it's power through the usb overcame another problem I thought we may have. TV is 12v and we use whether or not connected to EHU.
Location: Brimington, Chesterfield, Derbyshire and Acharavi, Greece
Status: Offline
Hi Bozzer, I have same Tv and Use USB sticks to put DVD's onto as well as playing my DVD's on the TV itself, I have a 32 gb Stick which as yet I have not managed to fill, I also have another one which the wife likes me to record onto from TV when in UK.
Don't forget that a lot of movies are now copy protected which means you cannot copy them onto your computer legally, and in fact the vast majority of copy programs won't let you either.
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Les
We have the Avtex 163DR and we play films we have recorded from the TV directly from a Harddrive via the USB.
There are a number of factors that you need to sort out to ensure that you will be able to get this to work.
Firstly you have to ensure that the DivX option is not switched off on your TV. It is on some. Our TV had it switched off. The method of checking and changing the setting is different on the 18.5 than ours. The way to do this was explained very recently on a topic in the Motorhome Chat section. I think it was as follows for your TV.
Switch TV on.
Press Source
Type in number 2580
The settings menu appears and at the bottom is the DivX setting
Change to On if necessary
Now you need to sort out the Harddrive.
We also have Passport Hardrives which are very good. However they will not work with the TV because they are NTFS formatted and you need the harddrive to be formatted to FAT32. Funnily enough I think that is the version you would need to work with a Mac.
We have a TRANSCEND 650GB STOREJET harddrive which you can get from Amazon and others and comes formatted to FAT32. We have about 500 films and TV programmes on it and it is still not full. It is designed for rough handling. This Harddrive takes power from the USB socket and works when the TV is working off 12v.
Now copying the DVD's. We have a programme called MAGIC DVD Ripper which is not free. It has been very successful and enables you to copy the films to lots of different formats. We set it to AVI which is an MPEG4 version and that works very well. You can set it to copy a DVD and when completed it will switch the computer off.
This DVD programme will copy bought DVD's as well as those we create on our Sony DVD player/writer . We don't copy bought ones because I am to mean to buy them. We just copy the TV programmes and watch them whilst we are away.
If you have a spare NTFS Formatted harddrive then you can store the films and then download them via your computer to a memory stick as that will work. You can get 10 to 15 films on a 16GB stick. The downside is the time it takes to load the stick.
Hope that helps . If you have any further questions just ask and I will try to answer them.
When you load the files onto the Harddrive put them in folders ie A, B, C etc or comedy, action based on the name or type of the film.
When you select the USB as input it puts up a list with only about 10 titles. So by putting them in folders you can scroll through the folders then having selected one you scroll through the films in it.
With 500+ TV programmes films on our harddrive I would have to scroll through 50 pages of films to get to the 'X men'.
On the question of copyright some argue that provided you only use your copy for your own personal use then its okay. You copy your own music cd's onto an Ipod which is the same.
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Greece
