Hi, sorry if this question has been asked before.
I want to buy a second hand laptop, around 700mhz PIII with 256meg ram 15g
HHD, and a DVD rom.
My question is, if I add an external DVD burner, can I burn a DVD straight
from the DVD rom to the DVD burner, or do I have to transfer all of the
information to my hard drive first.
My second question is:  Is a laptop of these specs even suited to this type
of task.  (I also want to reproduce all of the audio encoding {eg.DTS}on the
burnt disk.

Thanks in advance

David.K

Show quote Hide quote Sure you will do it but how long do you want to wait for a finished result a
1.5 hour film will take about 6.5 hours to do and you may find that you run
out of hard drive space fairly quickly. You really need at least a gigabyte
of ram as the file sizes are just huge with video. Our Silicone Graphics
dual CPU work stations will encode a 1 hour of video from a hard drive to
DVD in 34 minutes from an mpeg file longer if it is AVI and you will have to
play the video to get on the hard drive so that's an hour.

Generally they always say things work smoother especially on slower
systems when you copy it to the HD and then burn. With buffer underrun
technology that prevents problems in that area you can get away with a
lot though I dont think Id want to use a system that was always
depending on it , since it was so marginal.

Actually people have posted with CD burners and DVD burners theyve
used surprisingly ancient systems often lower than the makers
recommend as the min system to use and claim it still worked OK.
Obviously youll only know if you try it.

However the min requirement from manufacturers  range on externals
from 350 Pent III to 800 Pent III.  Some recommend using your HD.

I dont see any big deal copying to your HD.  Theoretically if someone
wanted to backup some DVD movies they had which would be wrong cause
copying is illegal and in no way am I condoning such an act. However
Ive done it just to test it of course. In fact I did it with when I as
stuck with my old Athlon XP 1 gig just to see how bad it would be and
it wasnt bad at all.

What you would do is use DVD decryptor which copies all the files on
the DVD to your HD would take 4-8 gigs. This program is free.

Then use DVDtoOne to shrink it down - if it needs shrinking down of
course to fit on a writable which has far less capacity than the store
bought DVD movie. Depending on the size , it may take 15-25 min and
how wimpy your PC is .   Yours may take longer. How much longer I cant
say. I was surprised actually that my 1 gig athlon was slower but not
eons slower than my old 3200 XP athlon and actually not even my
current AMD 64 3000. 

Then use NERO to burn.  It should take around
15-20 min to rip . 15-35 min to compress though its hard to say for
your system.  15-20 min to burn though once again your external burner
maybe slower.

Theres a completely free program called DVDShrink which cpies and
shrinks in one prog. I tried it a while ago and didnt like it and
several have said its slower than DVD2one but then you have to pay for
DVD2one.

In message <l5c831tp4v3jlha82sdnj975gjhu0s1***@4ax.com> "J***@Smith.com"
<xxxxs***@newscene.com> wrote:

Just so you're aware, the "Fair Use" section of copyright law gives you
the right to make backup copies of media you own.

In other words, creating a backup of a DVD for your own use isn't
illegal.  Before we get into jurisdictions, Fair Use is granted as part
of international copyright law which most civilized countries have
adopted.  If you're reading this, copyright law likely allows you to
create backups.

Thanks for all your help

David K
Show quoteHide quote

APC-Anyone else been ripped off?
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