DivX to Portable Hard Drive?

[phillip]

I have a fairy large DivX movies collection burnt onto DVDs. It can be rather tiresome trying to find certain movies sorting through hundreds of DVDs with numerous movies written onto each DVD. I recently bought a 2TB Western Digital portable hard drive to eliminate such a problem.

I'm just unsure what's the best method of transferring the files to my hard drive. So far, I've been inserting each DVD into my Macbook Pro and copying and pasting the movies into my portable hard drive. Not sure if that's the recommended way to do it. I've heard of people using handbrake etc?

Thanks

[SilverTonguedDevil]

Handbrake is for extracting a movie file from a DVD movie disc. You don't have a DVD movie disc. You have simple DVD storage discs. Your current method is correct.

DivX is similar to the out-moded AVI container with the more specific codec of MPEG-4.

A different format is called DivX Plus HD, but it is really the Matroska media container format (.mkv).

You say your computer is "my Macbook Pro", but you don't mention the OS version. If you have any trouble playing your files in QuickTime Player X, try QuickTime Player 7 after installing Perian, both free, links below. QT 7 has more options (some hidden until you pay for a Pro license) and more codec support than QT X.

The only reason to convert a file format is if you have no codec to play it or if the format has some annoying limitations, such as is the case with MKV (causes a very long delay while processing each frame to prepare the seeking and playback). All conversion processes cause degradation, however small or large.

[JamesR]

Get a PC