help importing videos in itunes

[userjoy]

I'm new to Macs - just bought a MacBook Air.

I have a lot of DVDs that are on disc and also one (so far) transferred to an external hard drive that can be read both by my old PC and by my MacBook Air. The PC can play the movie from the external drive, but I can't figure out how to play it on the Mac. I travel a lot and don't want to have to travel with DVDs and buy an external DVD reader to travel with - I'd rather be able to do it all from the external hard drive, which I'll have to travel with anyway.

How do I play movies on a Mac? I tried pulling them into the iTunes library, but that doesn't work.

I don't know anything about file types for movies. The original DVD and the copy on my external drive each has twenty files, with extensions ".bup," ".ifo," and ".vob." I have no idea what these are, which is the movie itself, etc.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

 

[SplicedBanjo]

iTunes uses MP4 format. DVDs are not only in a different format, they are also encrypted, so you won't be able to just copy them into iTunes.

You could play them as-is in VLC, but if you want to play them in iTunes, you will have to get a DVD ripper like HandBrake. While this is a popular and effective solution, there is some uncertainty as to whether it is legal.

 

[simsaladimbamba]

As the poster above noted, video DVDs can't be just imported into iTunes.

How to backup/copy/rip video DVDs to your HDD and transcode them to another format in Mac OS X.

How-To: Automating DVD & Blu-Ray (Backup, Encoding & Tagging) for Mac OS X 10.6​

 

[userjoy]

thanks!

Thanks, both of the people who responded to my query.

I realized that I was just not using VLC correctly - I figured out how to access the DVD I've put on my external disk. I don't have any problems with VLC instead of iTunes - but the Mac version of VLC doesn't look like the version I have on my PC and I wasn't seeing how to get it to browse and find the movie on the disk. My mistake!

Thanks, though! And no more need for responses on this this query (I'm not sure how to say "query can be closed now....).