CD/DVD upload to website

[Ferryman]

Hi everyone and hope that someone can help please...

Very new to this so forgive the 'silly' questions..

A client has asked me to to upload a couple of DVDs so that people can look at them on a website via a link. I haven't a clue what I'm doing and all the stuff I am reading is confusing me even more. The cds are around 2 hours duration each - is this possible please?

With thanks in advance.

[steve.ledger]

Welcome to the forums,

Well the client has little idea about what they are asking either I'm afraid..

A 2 hour (commercial) DVD title might be anything up to 11gb of data, so this would clearly be unrealistic.

What you must do is to 'rip' the .vob files and convert them to Xvid encoded .avi video (Though H.264 encoding is a becoming very popular now)
There was a small program available called DVDShrink for this, you might still find it around the web.
You can 'shrink' the DVD video to a more manageable size of around 700mb.
However, this is still a big upload and you might experience many time-outs trying to FTP that much data. A solution is to use an archiving utility like WinRAR and create spanned volumes of 100mb each. These can be uploaded much easier.
Your clients customers would have to download each of the spanned volumes and use WinRAR to join them back again before they could watch the video.

Not so straight forward is it?
Best is to create some short sample videos (from the ripped DVD .vobs) and upload them to YouTube then embed the YouTube video into a Web Designer page with a placeholder.

[steve.ledger]

Correction: DVDShrink does not convert to .avi - it 'shrinks' a commercial DVD down to a suitable size for blank 4.7GB media (for backup purposes

An additional step (and software) is required to convert to a 700mb .avi file

Sorry for the misprint

[Ferryman]

...That sounds like quite an involved job to me - far, far beyond my capabilities so I'm going to hand that over to someone else I think Thank you very much indeed for your very quick response and details of what would need doing - that's such a great help..

much appreciated