The VideoLAN Forums

I have a laptop I use just for watching movies when I travel. My windows media player kept acting up, so someone referred me to VLC. I have the most current version, just installed a few days ago. I have Windows Vista. I have read as much as I can and still can't seem to figure out how to "upload or convert" to avi a store bought OR home made dvd movie. I borrowed a bunch from a friend to put in my computer, was told this program would do it, but where are directions for dummies? I want to send them to My Videos Folder. Thanks for any help I can get. Going out of town this week and want to upload a stack of movies to watch. The sad thing is a friend from out of town had some movies on a flash drive, and put them in for me to watch, but I can't even remember how THAT was done, either.
Sherri

PS: not sure if it matters but I use Firefox browser......

how to "upload or convert" to avi a store bought OR home made dvd movie

I don't understand what you mean.

how to "upload or convert" to avi a store bought OR home made dvd movie

I don't understand what you mean.

He probably wants to rip a dvd Never did that with Vlc, so i can't help...

Firstly, I am a she and as my daughter informed me, rip is the correct term. I want to put a dvd movie INTO my laptop (upload or RIP) so I can return this stack of movies to my friend then I can watch them with VLC at a later time while out of town. Other forums have told me this is the program to do that with,that rip word, so I came here for help in figuring out how to do this.
Thanks
Sherri

If you want to backup/rip a DVD then, for example, DVD Shrink is probably a better tool to use. The main downside is that it will require several gigabytes of hard drive space per DVD, whereas just converting the main video into another format would reduce that to something in the order of 1/5 of the size (depnding on codecs used etc.).

If you use DVD Shrink then either backing up to a folder or an ISO image file (*.iso) should work, and you can then play either of those in VLC. The image file is probably better because you can just drag-and-drop the image file onto the VLC icon to start playing/watching it.

VLC can convert DVDs using dvdsimple (DVD without menus), only that doesn't really work in VLC 0.9.9 and crashes in 1.0.0-rc4, so unless HDD space is an issue it is quicker/easier to backup using something like DVD Shrink.

Cheers, Arite.