4 Best Ways to Copy DVD to Hard Drive Free and Fast [2025 Updated]

Need to make a copy of DVD to hard drive for watching on TV or just for backup? Here are 4 proven ways to rip and transfer DVDs to external hard drive or computer hard drive on Mac, Windows and Linux.

As DVDs can only be accessed with a DVD player or compatible DVD drives and physical discs won't last forever, more and more people prefer to copying DVDs to hard drive or other storage device for backup or easier playback. Once DVDs are saved on an external hard drive, you can play your favorite movies on big-screen TV instantly without finding the disc and being tethered to a DVD player. Moreover, this way can help DVD owners save space and protect discs from valuable data from loss due to physical damage, scratches, or degradation of the disc over time.

If you're looking for ways to transfer movies on DVDs to hard drive, you've come to the right place. In this guide, we will mainly walk you through 4 proven ways to copy protected DVDs to hard drive on Windows 11/10/8/7, Mac, and Linux. We will cover how to get the job done using VLC and and Handbrake which are frequently asked in communities.

Part 1. How to Copy Unportected DVDs to Hard Drive

Then, is it possible to copy DVD to hard drive directly? Well, the answer depends on the type of DVD you have. For homemade or burned DVDs that come without any protection, you can directly copy and paste audio_ts and video_ts from DVD to internal or external hard drive for backup purposes. However, this way is only workable for copying non-protected DVDs. Also, the digital copy may not be played on your computer or TV due to format compatibility issues.

If you have some homemade DVDs and want to transfer the contents to hard drive, follow the steps below:

Part 2. How to Rip and Transfer Protected DVDs to Hard Drive

However, most time you can directly copy contents in DVDs to hard drive. Why? First and foremost, almost all DVD movies and TV shows are one or more copy-protection schemes, which stop you from copying them directly. Secondly, if you directly play VOB files on a DRM-protected commercial DVD, the playback on your computer is pixelated. Differently, you can directly copy the content of the homemade DVD to hard drives and normally play the DVD with some media players on the computer. However, if you want to play them on your smart TV or somewhere else, there may be some problems, since most smart TVs have its own unique media file format requirements.

So these are the reasons why we need to rip DVD to hard drive instead of "copy DVD". As a result, a DVD ripper is essential for transferring protected DVD movies onto hard drive successfully. In this section, we will introduce 4 fast, reliable, and user-friendly tools — DumboFab DVD Ripper, VLC, HandBrake and MakeMKV and show you the detailed steps on how to rip protected DVDs to hard drive for easier playback and backup.

Method 1. Copy Protected DVD to Hard Drive with DumboFab DVD Ripper

DumboFab DVD Ripper is a reliable and flexible tool that works with nearly any DVD disc — including region-locked and copy-protected ones. With it, you can easily rip and copy DVDs to hard drive with just a few clicks. Frequent updates ensure compatibility with the latest protections that most tools can't handle. It also supports hardware acceleration to speed up ripping and transcoding, and can output to a wide range of popular digital formats like MP4, MKV, AVI, and more.

Key Features of DumboFab DVD Ripper:

Now download, install DumboFab DVD Ripper Windows or Mac version to your computer and follow the steps below to transfer your DVD collections to hard drive.

[Tutotiral] How to transfer DVD to hard drive with DumboFab DVD Ripper

Step 1. Add the Source DVD disc/Folder

Insert the target DVD disc into your DVD-ROM. Open DumboFab DVD Ripper and lick "Load DVD" button to import souorce DVD. A couple of seconds later after loading DVD, all titles will be presented and main title will be selected automatically.

Step 2. Select the Output Format for Your Hard Drive

On the Format panel, there are 400+ profiles including popular video/audio formats and device-specific presets. You can choose to copy DVD to any format you need. Below are some suggestions for different demands.

1. If you want to copy DVDs in 1:1 to hard drive without quality loss, you can click "Copy the entire disc" button to backup the full DVD content with original disc structure. Or you can click "Format" > "Copy" > "Directly Copy" to copy the main movie title as a single .VOB file.

2. If you want to copy DVD to a space-saving and mainstreaming format for later storing into hard drive, you have much more choices such as MP4, WMV, AVI, and MOV.

Tips: DumboFab DVD Ripper's backup mode neither degrades video quality nor reduces file size (movie size stays almost the same as original 4.7GB or 8.5GB). If you have some portable hard drives that are formatted in FAT32, with restrictive 4GB file size limit, it's suggested to rip DVD to MP4 H.264, for it strikes a perfect balance between file size (around 1-1.2GB) and output quality.

Step 3. Choose Where You Want to Save the DVD Copy File.

Click "Browse" button at the bottom to specify the destination folder. If you want to copy DVD to external hard drive to watch on TV, connect the external HDD to your computer and choose it as the destination.

Step 4. Start Copying DVD to Hard Drive.

Hit the big "Convert" button to start ripping DVD to hard drive. The ripping time depends on your settings and computer performance. Generally, it will take 5-15 minutes to copy or digitze a full DVD.

Method 2. Copy DVD to Hard Drive Free using HandBrake

Handbrake is a popular yet free DVD ripper among users running Windows, Mac, and Linux. There is no more DVD decryption feature built in Handbrake since the version 0.9.3. But you can still rip some protected discs to MP4, MKV or WebM, if with VLC libdvdcss installed. By loading the libdvdcss library in the application folder, Handbrake will dynamically read CSS and region-locked DVDs.

Note: HandBrake doesn't have DVD copy feature and Handbrake's native DVD transcoding results in quality degrading. So you cannot rely on Handbrake to make a lossless DVD to hard drive backup.

Below are steps to copy DVDs to hard drive using Handbrake.

[Tutotiral] How to rip DVD to hard drive free with HandBrake

Step 1. Get HandBrake.

Download and install HandBrake on your computer.

Step 2. Install libdvdcss on Windows or Mac.

The process of installing libdvdcss a little different for Windows and Mac users. For details, you can go to this article "How to use Handbrake to rip protected DVDs" to learn more.

Step 3. Import Source DVD

Open Handbrake, load the DVD from the Source Selection. It will take some time to scan the DVD titles. If the DVD you try to copy to hard drive has 99 titles or is protected with RCE, Disney X-project DRM or Sony ARccOS, you are likely to get an error message like "No valid source or titles found". In this case, I'm afraid that you'll have to resort to other professional DVD decrypters for help.

Step 4. Specify DVD Title

Choose the title you want to convert and copy to hard drive and adjust the angel and chapters you want to retain. The auto-selected title may be not the movie title. You'd better check it before ripping.

Step 5. Choose Preset

In the drop-down box of Preset, choose a preset as per your needs. Remember higher quality results in slow DVD converting speed and more space occupation of your hard drive.

Step 6. Choose Audio and Subtitle Track

Under Preset, you'll find seven tabs, namely Summary, Dimensions, Filters, Video, Audio, Subtitles, and Chapters. You can click on each tab and check if everything is set up exactly as you would like. You can click the Dimensions tab to change resolution, click Filters to turn on or turn off deinterlace, denoise, and more, click Video to specify video codec, bitrate, and framerate, click Audio to choose audio language and codec, and click Subtitles to specify subtitle language and whether you want to burn the subtitle into the DVD rip file or leave it as a standalone subtitle file.

Step 7. Start Copying DVD to Hard Drive.

Click the Browse button to choose a folder of your hard drive as the destination and click Start Encode to begin ripping DVD to hard drive. Compared with DumboFab DVD Ripper, HandBrake will take a longer time to finish the copying procedure. During our test, it runs at speeds of 110-130fps. We often see complaints about its slow encoding speed on Reddit and the like.

Method 3. Convert DVD to Hard Drive Free with VLC

VLC proves itself a solid choice with its simplified interface and powerful DVD decoder feature. Besides a full-fledged media player that supports a pretty extensive list of video and audio formats, it offers an easy way to transcode video/DVD to MP4 H.264, H.265, WMV, Webm, and more, with no need for extra codec packs.

However, VLC comes with a few trade-offs. VLC just supports ripping CSS and regional DVD discs to hard drive. You can't decrypt and rip a sophisticatedly-protectedd DVD with VLC, and you have no control over the conversion - resolution, bitrate, frame rate, deterlacing, aspect ratio, volume and more. Moreover, VLC cannot export Video_TS folder.

[Tutotiral] How to convert DVD to hard drive with VLC

Step 1. Download, install and run the VLC media player. Insert the original DVD to the disc drive that you want to copy to hard drive.

Step 2. Open VLC and click Convert/Save... under Media menu in the top left corner of the main interface. Click the Disc button to load the DVD disc.

Step 3. Once the DVD movie in the Disc Device is loaded correctly, you can do some tweakings. Under Starting Position, you are available to choose which title or chapter you want to rip. Just leave this at the default if you want to rip the whole movie. Under Audio and Subtitles, you can also choose the specific audio or subtitle track as per your needs.

Step 4. Click the Convert/Save button once you finished the settings. Alternatively, you can also go to the Open Disc from Media tab > browse and choose DVD locatoin at Disc Drive > choose Convert from the drop-down menu next to the Play button.

Step 5. When the Convert window pops up, select a video format from the Profile dropdown menu.

Step 6. Click Browse button to save the converted movie. Then click the Start button and convert a DVD to MP4, WMV, WMV, WebM or other file for later copying to hard drive. You can see the progress bar under the playback window.

There is a caveat: VLC doesn't rip all commercial DVDs to hard drive. If you fail to copy protected DVDs to hard drive, you can try DumboFab DVD Ripper for help.

Method 4. Copy DVD to Hard Drive with MakeMKV

MakeMKV has a simple and user-friendly interface that is easy to navigate, making it a suitable option for beginners. It can convert your DVD to a MKV file and save it to your hard drive. There is no compression in the result MKV file, which means you a high-quality but large-size MKV file. However, it's not a big problem if you have enough storage space on your hard drive.

In addition to ripping DVDs to hard drive, MakeMKV can also rip Blu-rays protected with latest versions of AACS and BD+. And, you can use the DVD/Blu-ray decrypting and riping feature for free during BETA.

Although MakeMKV is limited to output MKV format and it has limited customization options for output settings, it's a good free option for those who want to rip DVD to MKV for further storing on your hard drive.

MakeMKV is compatible with Windows, Mac, and Linux. If you're interested in this program, you can give it a try and follow our steps.

How to transfer DVD to Hard Drive using MakeMKV

Step 1. Load the source DVD.

Insert the DVD into the DVD drive of your computer. Launch MakeMKV and click Open DVD disk button to load the source DVD content.

Step 2. Select Content.

After you click the Open DVD disk button, MakeMKV will display the DVD contents as a tree structure. Now, you need to select the title, audio, and subtitle tracks you want to copy.

Step 3. Select Output Folder.

You can simply choose a folder of your hard drive as the destination.

Step 4. Transfer DVD to Hard Drive.

Just press the "Make MKV" button and wait for conversion. It will show two progress bars, elapsed time and remaining time.

Part 3. Quick Comparison of these DVD to Hard Drive Methods

If you've read the in-depth reviews above, this chart offers a side-by-side look at key factors of the top DVD to hard drive converters like supported DVD types, output formats, conversion speed, and pricing. Click any tool name to read the full review and find the best fit for your needs.

Conclusion Which is the Best Way to Copy DVD to Hard Drive?

Now that we've reviewed the top 4 DVD to hard drive methods, it's time to sum things up. Which tool is the best fit for your needs?

Each option has its trade-offs. The best fit depends on whether you prioritize speed, compatibility, budget, or simplicity. Free tools like HandBrake, VLC are suitable for basic needs or unprotected discs, but they fall short when dealing with encryption. MakeMKV handles some protected discs but is restricted to MKV output. If you need a more powerful tool that supports nearly all copy protections, even for the latest discs, and demands a wider range of output formats, we recommend DumboFab DVD Ripper. It offers a strong balance of usability, format support, and speed. It's especially useful for those with a large collection to convert.

Part 4. FAQs

1. How to copy DVD to hard drive on Windows 10/11?

DumboFab DVD Ripper is compatible with Windows 10/11. You can download and install the DVD to Hard Drive converter software and follow the steps mentioned above to copy the DVD on Windows 10/11.

2. What format do you need to copy DVD to external hard drive to play on TV?

If you want to rip a movie DVD to external hard drive for later playing on TV, you should make sure the format of the DVD rip file is supported by your TV. For example, below are some of the general video formats supported by most common TVs.

● Apple TV: H.264 video in .m4v, .mp4, and .mov.
● Roku TV: H.264/HEVC in MP4, MOV, M4V, MKV and VP9 in WebM.
● Sony TV: MP4, MPEG, WMV, MTS formats, etc.
● Samsung TV: AVI, MKV, MP4, MOV, etc.

If you use DumboFab DVD Ripper, you can rip the DVD to any of the formats in USB based on your TV model. You can also scroll down the output list to TV Video where you can find some TV output presets.

3. Is it legal to rip a DVD that you own to hard drive?

Whether it is legal to rip DVD that you own for personal use depends on where you live. In the US, it is illegal to rip a copy-protected DVD. But some countries may have different laws. Although you are probably not allowed to do that by law, you probably won't get sued/caught as long as you don't distribute the copies.

4. Can I copy DVD to Mac hard drive for free?

It depends. Mac offers built-in app Disc Utility to directly copy home movies from DVD discs to hard drive so that you can get rid of binder full of discs. But apple removed the ability to burn disc images from Disk Utility from MacOS High Sierra, Sierra, and newer. If you need to transfer protected DVDs and save copies into your hard drive as MP4 or other space-saving formats, please refer to the Mac version of DumboFab DVD Ripper for help.

5. What is the best format to rip DVDs onto a hard drive?

It depends on how you want to use the digital copy of your DVD. If you want to make an exact copy of a DVD, you can choose to save as Video_TS folder or a single VOB file. If you want to save main movie only and play without format incompatibility issue, MP4 is the best choice, allowing to stream the copied file on TV, PC or laptop and more.

6. How to copy vob files from DVD to hard drive?

● Step 1. Install and run DumboFab DVD Ripper, then load target DVD by clicking the Load Disc button.
● Step 2. Click "Copy the entire disc" button, the program will start to copy the whole disc content immediately.
● Step 3. Once done, you'll get a VIDEO_TS folder with a number of vob files in your hard drive.

7. What is the fastest way to copy DVD to hard drive?

Among these methods mentioned above, DumboFab DVD Ripper is the fastest way because it supports multiple speed-boosting technologies including GPU hardware acceleration, multi-core CPU, and Hyper-threading. It can reach 300-400fps when ripping a DVD to MP4. Put another way, a 2-hour DVD can be converted to MP4 within 10 minutes only. In contrast, HandBrake may need hours to finish this.