Software DVD player for playing from hard drive

[Blinky]

I've got a really noisy DVD drive that i can't get to shut up, and now that i've managed to almost silence the rest of my PC i want to watch my DVDs in peace!

The only solution i can see without getting a new drive is to rip the DVD and play it from my hard drive. Sadly I can't find a player that will let me do this.

PowerDVD 4 works fine until it changes VOB's, where it skips for a second. If i merge the VOBs it crashes (presumably cos u aren't supposed to get 4+GB VOBs!).

I've tried ZoomPlayer but was put off straight away by the poor quality of the output when playing straight from the DVD, despite the fact that it was apparently using the PowerDVD filters. I could also not get it to play from the hard drive regardless, though i did not spend a lot of time trying.

I had a brief look through the other players but none seemed to offer playback from the hard drive. Any recommendations for a (free) player?

[Yusaku]

PowerDVD4 (play from harddrive option, do NOT open the VOBs directly), MPC @ http://vobsub.edensrising.com

[DagMan]

You can rip the "whole" DVD to your Harddrive, for example with DVD Decrypter or SmartRipper and then you can open the .ifo file (looks like this VIDEO_TS.IFO) with PowerDVD and now you have the DVD 1:1 in PowerDVD (on your HD).

Another way is that you make an iso of your DVD with DVDDecrypter and then you can mount the iso file with Daemon Tools, then you have a virtual DVD drive with your DVD inside, without any noise :) .

[fengtao]

You can try DVDIdle at http://www.dvdidle.com/

DVDIdle caches the DVDs to hard drive transparently, you don't need rip the whole DVDs to hard drive at first.

Best Regards,
Fengtao

[BarnyGeroellheimer]

There's a tool to slow down the rpm of your cd-rom or dvd-drive.
It's a german tool called "CD-Bremse". If your are not speaking german, the only problem is, that the tools is availible in german only.

http://home.t-online.de/home/Joern.Fiebelkorn/CDBremse.exe

If you want to try it anyway, after installation and starting the tool, it give's you an interface where you can toggle the drive speed.

The field "CD-Geschwindikgeit" controls the speed of a CD-ROM-Drive.
The field "DVD-Geschwindigkeit" control the speed of a DVD-Drive.

If you are running Win NT, 2000 or XP, you need to install an ASPI-Manager or ASPI-Driver before.

I use this tool, and my DVD-Drive is absolutly silent during playback.

[Yusaku]

AFAIK if you install CDBremse on non-german windows, it'll switch to english UI

[BarnyGeroellheimer]

Possible. Never tried this.

[Blinky]

Cheers for all the suggestions. Have now got PowerDVD to work, previously i was just ripping the vobs for the actual film, then trying to load that ifo file, ripping the whole dvd and opening video_ts.ifo worked great tho, thanks.

I tried DVDIdle before and it seemed to make no difference, maybe i was doing something wrong...plus if i recall it wanted me to pay if i wanted to use it for more than 15 mins of a film...

Nero comes with a tool that sounds very similar to CDBremse but unfortunately my DVD drive (Pioneer 105S i think, the slot loader)doesn't work with that so i'm not sure if this will do any better but i'll give it a try, thanks.

[Yusaku]

@fengtao: do you know how does that DVD region free work? If the drive is RPC2, you just cannot ask the drive to fetch other-region CSS key, can you? And since some titles have short vobs scrambled with different key than the rest of the disc (CSS can change on VOBID change, right?), the brutal DeCSS methot will NOT work 100%.

Well, I'll rather spend $60 for a DVD drive that I am sure can be RPC1 modified, than $40 for a solution that just might work.

[fengtao]

To Blinky: DVDIdle don't have the 15-minute playback limit, the trial version is full functional. Our another product DVD Region-Free limits to 15-minute playback.

To Yusaku: I will not tell you how can I do that, because it's a business secret :-)

Best Regards,
Fengtao

[Yusaku]

business secret here & there... Well, the truth is, that
1) region protection means you won't get CSS key out of the drive and that direct ASPI commands will fail
2) even the screenshots indicate that you do it by brute-force descrambling (not that there is any other way)

In other words this means that
1) titles with really short VOBIDs won't play (say, if the FBI logo would be encoded as a separate VOBID with different CSS key) (I know that there aren't many/maybe even any, but technically your product cannot descramble ALL discs; and it will probably fail on the ones with CSS key change on CellID boundaries (even though that's out of specs, there are such discs))
2) most probably there will be severe problems with >0.99GB VOBs

Gosh... if the "business secret" is that you use DeCSS2... I'd think business secret is hooking all the API functions of windows to fool the player, but not the 30 lines of code that are doing the actual work :)

[MvB]

@blinky

There's an easy way to tell windvd (better picture than powerdvd if you force weave!) to play your dvd from the harddisk:

backup your dvd into a directory on your hd and enter at dospromt (works for w2k, should work for every windows):

subst k: <Path to directory>

Then your software will be able to play from k: as from you dvd drive