[spunkdog]

I HOPE SOMEONE CAN HELP ME OUT HERE. I BOUGHT NERO 7 A MONTH AGO FOR ONE REASON. I DOWNLOADED CHICKEN LITTLE ONTO A CD. I WANT TO TRANSFER IT TO A DVD SO I CAN PLAY IT ON A DVD PLAYER. DOES ANYONE KNOW STEP BY STEP ON HOW TO DO THIS. THANK YOU FOR YOUR TIME

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You mean, Chicken Little, the movie?

[coachwife6]

You mean, Chicken Little, the movie?

[coachwife6]

Dr. Bombay from Fort Worth Telegram explains the situation much better than I do.

Copying DVDs may be illegal, but some people still ask how to do it

Dear Dr. Bombay: I want to copy DVDs onto my Video iPod so I can watch movies in my hotel room when I travel. I've seen a few you can download but nothing that I like so far.

-- Movie Fan

Dear Movie Fan: I'm sure you meant to say you wanted to copy DVDs that you already own onto your new little toy, right? You really don't want get me started on another rant about digital rights management, bootlegging and greedy studios, do you?

Too bad. You know why there are so many bootlegs? Studios are living in the '50s, before technology made it possible to easily distribute music and films in a multiplicity of formats. Going to a video store and buying or renting a copy of Anchorman is pretty old school when you can download it -- albeit currently that's mostly illegal -- and view it on any networked device on your home. Would you rather trudge up to Blockbuster and stand in line behind somebody with the avian flu or click a link? Yeah, me too, but until that golden era rolls around, I've dumped Blockbuster in favor of Netflix. Delivery of movies to my home is much less of a hassle, although now it's solely dependent on the sobriety of my mail carrier. I'm still waiting for The Jayne Mansfield Story to show up.

In a perfect world, your DVD purchase would include rights to download the film in whatever formats you wanted. I certainly wouldn't mind paying a buck or two extra to have a copy of Showgirls on my Pocket PC.

Get this straight, though. Copying a rental DVD, even if you don't plan to distribute the copies through your worldwide network and sell them on the streets of Shanghai, is wrong. We're going to talk about your question in theoretical terms only.

Getting something as big as a movie to fit on anything, much less a dinky little iPod or Pocket PC, is not easy. A typical two-hour movie on a DVD may take five or six gigabytes of space, and that's after compression. If you have the high-dollar 60GB iPod, you might think there's room for maybe eight or 10 flicks, or around 20 hours of video. Surprise! You actually have room for 150 hours of video because of the compression scheme used, a variation of MPEG-4 (DVDs use MPEG-2) that gives really great quality on the small screen. Pocket PCs, on the other hand, have no hard drive and very limited memory. Videos are typically stored on removable memory cards, but about the biggest of those around is a puny 1 gigabyte. As a result, videos for Pocket PCs have to be compressed out the wazzoo.

Luckily for you, there are lots of programmers out there who love movies -- or maybe they're just trying to impress their imaginary girlfriends. Last time I looked on Google, there were dozens of all-in-one programs to do what you hypothetically want. Don't make yourself crazy trying to do it all yourself. Find one of these instead.

Otherwise, you're going to have to go through the laborious process of ripping the files off a DVD, converting them to a format you can compress, actually compressing them, then doing it all over again because you got the screen aspect ratio wrong or you compressed it so much the actors look like they're made out of Legos. Can I do it? Yes. And after it took four days to get Napoleon Dynamite to fit on a 128-megabyte CF memory card, I vowed never to fly solo again.

I really don't care what program you use to theoretically turn your DVD into an MPEG-4. It's up to you. Google for "convert DVD to Video iPod" -- well, duh, what else would you look for? -- and see what comes up. Almost all of them offer trial versions that either limit the time of the recording or watermark it by superimposing some "pay me" reminder. Find one you like.

I tried Xilisoft DVD to Pocket PC Ripper when researching this question, and it seems easy enough to use, although I had to recompress the video file with Windows Media Encoder to get it to a reasonable size. There's also a Xilisoft version for iPod. PodBlast ( www.podblastvideo.com) is due out at the end of March, and it also looks simple to use. Is all this legit software? Probably not entirely. These waters are pretty murky. Remember, the DVDs are copy-protected for a reason. And the last time I tried the Xilisoft site it was not responding. Maybe Interpol has been at it again. You can still find the software at other sites, though, such as www.soft32.com. Let your conscience be your guide.

http://www.dfw.com/m...ay/13998196.htm

[dnet]

I HOPE SOMEONE CAN HELP ME OUT HERE. I BOUGHT NERO 7 A MONTH AGO FOR ONE REASON. I DOWNLOADED CHICKEN LITTLE ONTO A CD. I WANT TO TRANSFER IT TO A DVD SO I CAN PLAY IT ON A DVD PLAYER. DOES ANYONE KNOW STEP BY STEP ON HOW TO DO THIS. THANK YOU FOR YOUR TIME

ok i hope this helps you need to put your chicken little cd in your cd/dvd burner and then go to my computer and open up the file on the disk then you need to copy and paste all the files to my documents ( its just easier to remember where you put it at )when you are done copying and pasting take your cd out and put a blank dvd in your cd/dcd burner then you need to open up your nero 7 make sure you click dvd at the very top then move your mouse to photo and video and look for make your own dvd video click it now another page will open up it will say untitled ( dvd-video ) nero vision on your right you will see a list click on add video files then another page will open up click in the location area and find where you copied and pasted your files at my documents click on the small arrow and search for your files add all the files for chicken little they willautomatically go to your untitled project and when you get all the files close out the smaller page and now you will see all your files in the list then click next then click close then click next then click close then click nextand sometimes a small window will pop up talking about your ntsc and pal settings click no (always click no)then click close and then click burn i know its a very long but you said step by step and i hope this works for you it has for me GOOD LUCK