Be Excellent To Each Other

I just bought seasons 1 and 2 of Breaking Bad on DVD, and like the world's thickiest thicky, I assumed I would just be able to copy the file structure off the discs onto my NAS, and play them from there using VLC.

Needless to say Windows is having none of it and says the discs are copy-protected.

As such I'm now in the ridiculous situation of having to search out some software that will rip my legitimately bought DVDs and allow me to transfer them to my NAS.

Back in the day it was DVD Decrypter and stuff like that, but I'm completely out of touch now.

SHOULD HAVE JUST PINCHED THE BLOODY THING OFF USENET.

Anyway, can anyone recommend some software that will get the job done please?

Obviously I can just watch the programme with the DVD in the drive, but that's like, old fashioned and annoying.

AnyDVD purports to work around all DVD copy protection so if you run that you should then be able to just copy the files off as you wanted to. There's a trial version of it available here so you can at least check if it works as advertised.

Cheers Bamba

Also, I've just thought, I have an old Windows XP machine on the network (it's basically my donkey work machine), maybe that will let me just copy the files off, I'll have a go......

I wouldn't have thought so, but it can't hurt to try!

There's also this which seems to be free as opposed to AnyDVD which would need to be paid for after the trial period finished.

The two things I still use are Handbrake and Formatfactory

However assuming you have a reasonable internet connection your still quicker just downloading them off a newsgroup than ripping them yourself.

Well yes but I thought I'd do the right thing and buy them.

Unfortunately I appear to have ended up with an inferior product to what I'd have got if I'd have just pirated them.

How is it inferior. You bought the media it is intended to be on. You wish to use said media in a different way. If you popped it in your DVD player it would be 100% the correct product.

You should have just taken out a Netflix sub and watched them on there.

Netflix is awesome.

But I can never 'own' Netflix, I want my music and films to be a permanent collection, that I can always return to as and when I want to.

My favourite films I'll easily watch ten times or more, I don't want to be dependent on a subscription and/or a service being available and/or full-speed broadband being available when I want to watch a favourite film.