hey i am siddanth and i am a new member. how you guys doin??
i need help with my with my sony DCR-DVD 301 camcorder which my dad owns.
here is my problem. till this date, my dad has been using this camcorder to record home videos and he loves it. my dad is a video fanatic and records every moment of our lives. and he keeps watching it too. the problem is that now he has more than 200 mini dvd's of recorded home videos. the dvd's are increasing so much that he cant keep track of each and every one of them and has already lost a couple.

his birthday is approaching, and i plan to give him a home theater pc in which i want all of his home videos recorded on to a hard drive so he can play it whenever he wants at a click of a button without the hassel of taking it out from the dvd player every time.

is there a way to convert each dvd into one individual file and store it in my hard drive??
i hope you guys understand what i am saying.
thanks a lot

200 miniDVDs of video will take about 300GB on a harddrive.

I'm not aware of any easy way to get a whole miniDVD into one file. There are a couple of ways to do kinda what you want, though...

1) You can copy the entire miniDVD's file structure into a directory on the harddrive. If the software you will have on that machine can handle it, you can direct it to the starting file for the miniDVD and it will play it. For example, I made a DVD that was a compilation of my camcorder miniDVD scenes. I copied the DVD file structure to a directory on my harddrive. In that directory, there are two sub-directories. If I go into the one named VIDEO_TS and double-click on the file named VIDEO_TS.IFO, my Nero DVD player software will startup at the top menu level of the DVD. I can then click on a scene and it will play the right file, just as if it was in a normal DVD player.

2) Don't know about the 301, but my 403 came with Picture Package software that will let you convert scenes from your miniDVD into MPG files on your computer's harddrive. (The miniDVD can be in either your PC's DVD reader or in the camcorder connected to the PC via USB2. Each scene on the miniDVD is converted into a single MPG file. If your machine can handle individual MPG files, you could put all the files from a miniDVD into a single directory named for that miniDVD. I suppose that if you had video editting software, you could combine several MPG files into a single MPG file.

Hope that helps...

What a wonderful idea, Siddanth!

I don't know about mini DVDs but I'm assuming they play on a standalone DVD player? If so, you can rip each one using DVD Decrypter (it's freeware) or one of many other DVD "rippers".

You can rip to a variety of file types including VOB files (they play on standalone DVD players), MPG2, AVI, etc.

I'm just not sure of a good way to organize all the files of the ripped DVD's so he can easily maneuver between them all & know what one is what (IE a menuing system.) Someone should write a program to do that (where you just add a line to a menu, type in a description & then tell it which file to play) and sell it! The closest thing I can figure out right now would be to set up an HTML file that would contain all the descriptions & then links to the files.

Again, I think this is a wonderful idea & your dad will be not only pleased, but proud!