Table of Contents
**How To watch your favourite video DVD on your EeePC**
(Using a Linux desktop PC for part of the procedure)
Health and Safety Warning:
The procedure described in the following text is probably illegal in some countries afflicted with very stringent copyright or copy-protection legislation (for instance the US of A, where it would contravene the Digital Millennium Copyright Act)
**Aim:**
Since I got my EeePC I have wanted to use it in bed at night, to watch videos; but I could not be bothered with the annoyance (and costs) of attaching an external DVD drive. So I found a way to copy any video, on my desktop PC, from a DVD to a USB pen-drive or a SDHC memory card, so I could play the video on the EeePC.
The following procedure has been tested on a desktop box running Mandriva Linux 2008.1
**Requirements:**
You will need to have or to install the following applications on your desktop PC:
- dvdrip (and dependencies)
- libdvdcss (This is the software banned by law in some places) to decode the DVD files.
dvdrip is available from main or contrib repositories, libdvdcss from the PLF repositories.
**Procedure:**
On the desktop PC:
- Start dvdrip and load the video DVD in the reader.
- Rip and transcode the tracks of the video which you want, not forgetting to set language and subtitles to taste.
- Copy the resulting .avi file onto the USB pendrive or SDHC card.
On the EeePC:
- Insert USB pendrive or SDHC card
- Open My Home
- Open the logical drive of SDHC card or USB pendrive
- Click on the .avi file
- Enjoy.
**Notes:**
- On the desktop PC you will need to have HD free space equal to twice the size of the DVD, to accomodate the temporary files.
- Once the DVD has been ripped and transcoded, you can safely delete from the desktop PC everything except the .avi file to free HD space.
- For viewing, the .avi file has one drawback when compared to the original DVD: you will not be able, while watching, to change the language or the subtitles.
- The trancoding part of the process does take a long time (like several hours on a desktop box with an AMD Sempron™ 3400+ cpu and 2 Gb memory )
R.Olgiati ( renaud@olgiati-in-paraguay.org )
