How to Play DVD Movies From a Folder

For those with Windows 7, you can easily (sort of) copy your DVD Movies from the DVD drive to a folder on your computer, and then use Windows Media Center to play the movie from the folder – no disc needed. Here’s how…

Step 1. Determine where to put the files

You are going to copy the contents of the DVD disc to a folder on your computer, however you will need LOTS of space. Each disc will use about 6 to 8 gigabytes of disk space. If you have more than one drive letter, examine each one for free space and determine which is most suitable.

Step 2. Create the folder structure

I suggest making a folder called “DVD Movies”, and then within that folder, make a folder for each DVD movie disc. If the drive where Windows is installed has the most space, you can create a folder on the Desktop or at the top level of the folder structure on that drive.

In my example however, I only made one folder on the Desktop and named it “G3″ for the disc “G3 – Live in Tokyo”. If I were copying multiple discs, I would make a “DVD Movies” folder and within that, I would make a “G3 – Live in Tokyo” folder.

Step 3. Copy the DVD movie disc

Insert the movie DVD into the DVD drive. If the disc begins to play automatically, close it. Open up “Computer” so that you can see all the drives which are installed on your computer, and find the one that has the DVD disc in it.

Now, “Right Click” the DVD drive and select “Open”. You will see two folders on the DVD disc;  AUDIO_TS and VIDEO_TS.

“Right Click” the VIDEO_TS folder and click “Copy”.

Now paste it into the folder you made for it. Do not worry about the AUDIO_TS folder – it is almost always empty (unless this disc also contains music files).

This will take quite a while to copy because there is a lot of data there – so give it time to complete.

Step 4. Launch Windows Media Center

Open Windows Media Center (not Media Player). Now you need to tell it where your DVD folder is. You need to open Tasks->Settings and click it to open the list of settings.

From the list of settings, select “Media Libraries”

From the “Select a Media Library” screen, select “Movies” and click “Next”

On the next screen, select “Add folders to the library” and click “Next”

The next screen is “Add Folders for Movies”, select “On this computer (includes mapped network drives)” and click “Next”

Now you need to navigate to the “DVD Movies” folder that you made. This is a little tricky because of the interface. In my case, the G3 DVD folder is on my Desktop, so I clicked the “plus sign” button to the left of “Desktop” to expand it.

Once you find your DVD Movies folder, selected it and click “Next”

On the next screen, under “Are you finished making changes”, select “Yes, use these locations” and then click “Finish”

Now select the Button in the upper left corner of the screen to return to the main Media Center screen (see screen-shot below)

To play the DVD from the folder, begin by selecting “Movies” from the list

You should see a selection of the DVD movies you have added to the Media Library. If you do not, give Windows some time to build the list and try again.

In my case, I have just the one DVD movie so I clicked on its icon.  The next screen will give you some info on the movie and give you the choice of ejecting the DVD (which does not apply in this case) or “Play” the DVD. Click on “Play”

Now… finally you should be able to play your DVD movie from a folder!

If things don’t work

When I first attempted this, I was using Windows 7 installed as a VMWare virtual machine. The DVD movie refused to display and I received an error telling me the video card was not compatible. VMWare provides a software based video display adapter called VMWare SVGA II. This emulates a pretty generic SVGA video card that did not meet Media Center’s qualifications. I point this out because the same might apply to the real video card or circuitry you may have in your computer or laptop. There may not be much you can do in that case. It’s worth checking the latest drivers for your video card – preferably from the manufacturer and not the ones provided by Microsoft. These may implement all the hardware features of your video card, whereas the Microsoft versions will probably not.

Copy Protection

If your DVD is copy-protected – as is the case with my DVD of The Lord of the Rings – the copy will fail with the following error message…

This occurs because Windows adheres to Digital Rights Management standards and will refuse to copy protected material if the rights do not allow it.

DVD Rippers

There are programs known as DVD Rippers which can copy otherwise copy-protected files. DVD Decrypter is one, and you can download it here. It’s very east to install.

After installation, assuming you still have the DVD disc in the DVD drive, and assuming you already have created the folder where you will copy the DVD movie to,  just launch DVD Decrypter and tell it where to copy the files by clicking on the folder icon (circled in red in the screen-shot below).

Now just navigate to the folder where you will store the DVD movie files and select it. In my case, it’s a folder on the Desktop called “Lord of the Rings”.

Finally, click the large icon at the bottom of the DVD Decrypter screen (circled in red in the screen-shot below) to begin the copy process. You do not have to tell the program about the VIDEO_TS folder – it knows which folder to copy.

All you need to do now is wait for the copy process to complete. When finished, go back to – Step 4. Launch Windows Media Center – and tell Media Center where the DVD movie folder is.

Update: Well this is embarassing, but it should be said. In one of the screen-shots you can see a small picture of the cover of the G3 DVD, and another screen-shot that shows a synopsis of the DVD. They appear because of a mix-up on my part. I forgot that I had left the original DVD in the drive and Media Center was showing that information because it picked it up from the DVD disc. So it was actually showing me two entries for the G3 movie. If you go back to the screen-shot and  look underneath the G3 cover picture, you will see a light purple/lavender rectangle with G3 printed inside it. That is the icon you get for the folder on the hard drive. Once I realized it was actually reading from the disc, I had to remove the disc and try things again. This time, it did not show the icon with the  cover picture of the DVD, just the lavender icon. And when you click it, you do not see the synopsis either. My bad! The movie still played however.