[double doh]

Hello all, new user here and very inexperienced computer person.Can you help me step into the DVD age?

I travel a lot and want to put some of my movies onto my laptop, and later I would also like to figure out how to get them onto my ipod as well, But one step at a time eh?

So I tried to put a dvd in (can't remember what I used as it was before xmas and I gave up as it wouldn't play !)

What happened was it put two folders on my computer....

Audio_TS ( which has nothing in it )

and Video_TS which has a lot of different files in it.

How do I get it to play?

Do I need to buy some softwear ?

Computer came with roxio easy media creator 9, but I have deleted it DOH. Although I could do a restore, but would have to completely re-add all my music *sigh* ....do-able but time consuming

I picked up Nero 8 ultra but haven't opened it yet since I am not sure I need it and have read that it can be tough for a newbie like me to figure out. so am considering returning it.

Help !

[Mike0001]

Install Nero. It has a wizard for creating DVDs. Very easy to use. It also contains playing software.

If your DVD is commercial, it is not sufficient to just copy the dvd to your laptop. You would need DVD Decrypter which is probably illegal in the US, possibly not in Canada. This creates an unencrypted version of VIDEO_TS on your hard disk and you point Nero Showtime at that folder to play it.

If you want to compress too, there are free and commercial tools to create MPEG4, divx, xvid and wmv files that are much smaller than VIDEO_TS. DivX Converter is quite cheap but if you want free then I suggest you look at
http://ipodlegends.com/how-to-conver...-mp4-for-free/

which will create files you can play on iPod or PC.

At the expensive end I would recommend TMPGEnc Express.

Possibly Nero 8 already contains such tools.