Laptop ripping/watching on 10GB HD

[guitar1]

On a 10 gig (about 7-9 gigs free) P3 700, no video card/memory, and 192 megs SDRAM laptop with 8x dvd-rom, will I be able to fit a rip onto my drive? If so, how many? Is the rip 4.7 gigs, ala regular DVD movie size? Will I be able to still fit the conversion into avi on the same drive? (what program should I use for this step?). After that, should I use on-demand producer (www.microsoft.com) to convert it to asf for laptop viewing/cd-burn or should I go all out, spend a long time (how long?) converting it and burning it (with a 4x iomega external burner I don't always have access to, by the way) onto a CD-RW, the only format supported by my dvd player. Whew, that's a lot of questions: Here's one more, though (sorry!) Is it possible to get 5.1 surround out of a laptop, and if so, what modifications will I need to perform? Many thanks, address whatever questions you want, keep cool, and I'll see ya.

Mark

P.S. One more question (NOOO!): At what point can the movie be watched (aside from on the dvd itself) after ripping? Can the vob's be viewed? Is it even worth it?..that was 3 questions, eh? lol

[guitar1]

um, addendum here, what's the best compression for VOB? divx/asf (mentioned above)/..rm? Something wild & crazy? thanks,

mark,

again.

[trixiedivx]

I can try and help you with some of your question. a 10 gig HD alptop is enough space for a decent sized movie...

remember that when you see what smartripper tells you (for example 5.3Gig out of 9.5GIG) you have as far as HD space, you also need to figure in other things, such as conversion with dvd2avi.

If you are ripping the sound and a d2v file with dvd2avi you can count on adding another gig onto the amount of space you will need.

If you are making VCD or SVCD then you need to add yet more onto the amount of HD space you need. For example you may need to add another 1 gig to 1.5 gig for the outputted .MPG files. So you see (in the example I gave above) your nice cushy 4.2 gig of padding you had in the beginning is reduced significantly... and as always the fancier you get with SVCD the larger your encoded files can become.

To answer if you can watch vobs, you can double click on your first vob after you convert to d2v and audio and watch it with windows media, but I have played around with it and even when I have used track 1 with dvd2avi (which was english) sometimes I would get another language in windows media. Also you cant control the movie or move within it when watching vobs. I dont know why you would even want to watch the vobs other than to make sure you got the entire rip off the DVD. <--- in this case you may use the viewing option in dvd2avi and it will play the vobs real-time without audio.

hope I helped...
Trix

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: trixiedivx on 2001-07-17 13:24:37 ]</font>

[guitar1]

okay, lets say that I have enough memory on my HD, what's the best compression algorithm to use? Aside from VCD, does anyone know if asf, wmv (same thing, right?), rm, mpg, qt, mov, whatever is best for size vs. quality? Thanks

Mark

[poopyhead]

heh....get bigger HDD