How to Copy DVD to USB?

There may be numerous occasions where the ease of carrying an external USB stick is much more preferred than carrying DVDs or CDs. And, considering the standard these days where the laptops are not having any DVD drives anymore, it becomes even a bigger issue altogether. However, there are more than dozens of convenient options to choose from that will allow you to have your content anywhere on any device you wish to. There are occasions where the USB port is the only thing available on a device and you have no other option to insert a DVD drive in it.

Of the various formats of media available on the web, anything can be ripped and stored as digital files on your external USB stick, very conveniently. The DVDs and CDs have been obsolete for a number of years, and the protection standards in many best DVD ripping and copying software allows one to copy DVD to USB in one go. There are numerous manuals available online that explain how to copy DVD to USB. The most common files are videos and music files and they may be in formats like mp4, avi and mp3, flac and so on, respectively. These can be played by any free media player without any problems, and most probably your default media player already supports these formats. However, the copying process from DVD to USB is not hindered by the format of the files themselves.

There are two most widely used ways, and it works fine every time. First, is pretty straightforward and is a 2 step procedure. The requirement is a DVD drive in your laptop, desktop or an external DVD drive that can run your DVDs and CDs. The USB ports are ubiquitous nowadays and you would already have at least 2 of them. You are supposed to insert your DVD into your drive, and the USB stick to any one of your USB ports.

Then, you must go ahead and click on the DVD drive that is now active on your computer. On opening it, you must be able to select all the files using Ctrl+A or you can manually select desired files with Ctrl+Left Click on that filename. Then, you hit Right Click and choose Copy or do so by pressing Ctrl+C. The next step is the last step, that is, Ctrl+V, at the desired location, which in this case is your pen drive or USB stick. It must be shown as removable media and you can also directly send your files to removable media, after the Right Click option above, instead of choosing to Copy first.

Second is the option that allows you to copy DVD to USB in three steps. Yes, that is one more than before, but don't think it is futile just yet. This additional step ensures that the format of the files is readable by your media player, and sometimes can also let you choose the settings of the video when ripping it off the DVD, instead of simple copy and paste. These are useful features that come with software like DVDFab DVD Copy/Ripper. In this case, you insert the DVD into the drive, insert the USB into the port, then go ahead with the software, and select the input location and the output location as DVD drive and USB stick. In the middle is the intermediate step that allows you to seamlessly copy the contents of the DVD to your USB via the ripper. The ripper decrypts the protection and copies the contents in a format that is already encoded in the DVD, then it decodes it into a format like mp4 or avi that any media player can play, then it copies that file to the output location or the USB stick. In some cases, you might want to check the space on your USB stick before trying to copy them.

There are some other ways too. One of them makes a DVD Rip for USB. This is a proprietary feature that some DVD ripper software keeps as a predefined item in its list of presets. This should format the output files such that it is usable later. In some cases, the DVD has ISO files or you would prefer to save the contents as an ISO image. In some cases, you might want to convert it into a Blu-ray quality, HD quality or something else before you copy DVD to USB. This can be done using the intermediate step explained before and it can be chosen easily from drop-down menus provided by the software. In another case, you can choose the USB stick, and the software or the DVD ripper shall convert them to the proper format automatically without asking you to manually set something at all.

Thus, there are many ways you can carry your stuff from those old DVDs in your pen drives that come now in sizes of 128GBs as well. Thus, you can comfortably keep them and even store them forever as digital files on your hard disk. Once, done you does not need the DVD drive anymore, so you can go ahead and return it to your neighbor.