How to Import a Movie from DVD to Vista Ultimate to iPhone

I don’t watch a lot of television. I love The Wire, as well as Breaking Bad. My wife joined a bunko group and the women told her she looks like the actress on Weeds, a show we had never seen. So we downloaded season 1 off of iTunes and became hooked. (For the record, my wife is prettier). We just finished watching season two, but when we tried to download Season three we learned that it isn’t available yet. (While it’s on piratebay.org, I’m just not into stealing content). I’m not sure when the DVD for season three will be released, but I found someone on eBay selling a promotional copy of the entire season. I won the auction for $80.

I now want to import it into my computer and then transfer it to iTunes so that I can import into my iPhone and watch the shows while driving in my Prius.

Issue Number One: How do I save a DVD to my hard drive? Windows Media Center does not have import functionality. I did some googling and found some freeware called DVD Shrink. It took less than 20 seconds to download and install. I opened the program and the first selection was “open disc,” and it immediately found the disc in my DVD drive, Team America. It then took a few minutes “analysing” (sic) the movie. Once that completed, I hit the “Backup!” button, at which time a “RCE Region Protection” warning popped up. I specified the region as USA, Canada, set where I wanted the movie saved, and hit run. An “Encoding” window popped up, with a screen showing the movie previews, etc moving very fast. Unfortunately, once the movie was on my hard drive, it was broken up into VOB files that I could not do anything with. So I deleted the movie and started over. This time I did some googling and found the following instructions, which recommend using dvdshrink combined with a program called Videora. Both are free downloads.

The mistake I made was that I didn’t combine the movie's VOB files into one using DVD Shrink.

Getting DVDs into Videora:

1) Download and install DVD Shrink

2) Open DVD Shrink, and go to Edit -> Preferences...

3) Go to the Output Files tab, and uncheck Split VOB files into 1GB size chunks. Click OK.

---Continue----

4) Click the Re-Author button on the top of the window.

5) Find your DVD drive in the DVD Browser list, and open it. Drag the Main Movie to the left half of the window.

6) Click on the Compression Settings tab in the right half, and then pick No Compression in the drop down menu for video compression (it says Automatic by default).

7) Only check off the audio track you want encoded to your iPod/iTunes (probabaly the first one). None of the subtitles will be converted, so you can uncheck all of those, too.

8) Click the Backup! button on top. Wait patiently as DVD Shrink analyzes your movie.

9) In the Select backup target drop down, select Hard Disk Folder. In the next box, type wherever you want your DVD files saved. Press OK and wait while it does its stuff (may take up to 20 minutes).

10) Once it's done, open Videora. Click Transcode New Video, and navigate to the folder you chose in DVD Shrink for backing up the movie. Open the VIDEO_TS folder.

11) There should be a VOB file in the folder, select it and begin encoding however you like.

Videora automatically puts the movie into iTunes. The drawback to this technique is that DVDshrink and Videora each take quite a long time. DVDshrink worked flawlessly, without any ads. Videora is a little strange. It displays ads as you are using it, and it takes a long time to respond to commands. But it did work. When it finished, Team America was in iTunes, ready for transfer to my iPhone. I’m now waiting for Weeds to arrive so I can put it on my iPhone.

UPDATE:

Videora was just too buggy, too unpredictable, and too slow. So I bought and downloaded a program called cucosoft DVD to iPhone converter. It was $29.99, and it works flawlessly. While the process discussed above requires two different applications and two steps, cucosoft is a single application. You just open cucosoft, load the DVD, pick which films/shows you want to import, and then click a button. When it finishes, it even asks you if you want it imported automatically into iTunes. It works flawlessly.