[cuttlefish]

I have a couple of fishing DVD's off a magazine and as they are not copyrighted, it is OK to copy them to another DVD etc. for home viewing.

But whilst I can do this OK to a DVD, there is no way I can make it work to the flash drive!

I have tried using 1click DVD and also Nero but though the file(s) appear on the device, they won't play on anything i.e. PC, DVD player or portable DVD player.

What am I doing wrong?

[fairnooks]

Do you know the format of the files you are trying to play? Vob? Mpg? Avi? Is the entire structure of the DVD on the flash too or just the video file(s)?
Do you know the flash drive is working and able to play a video file; the fact that it won't play on the PC makes me wonder about either the function or capability of the flash drive or the format of the file(s).

[cuttlefish]

Thanks for reply!

OK, the three file formats are:

BUP - IFO - VOB

I have found the flash drive OK in normal day to day operations such as saving/deleting/copying etc. and everything appears fine in that regard.

I tried putting an "avi" file on it and it worked fine on by PC so it must be the way I am trying to transfer it that is the problem.

Some other TSG guy suggested that the 32 gig drive has layered componants that may prevent large files being written and I have just now tried to copy a 6.1 gig file to the flash drive using Tera Copy and it has frozen at 65% so maybe there is something in that being you can't just dump say a 20 gig file on it and have it work!

If that were the case then that would explain why the movie won't work on a ything being in an unfinished condition.

As I mentioned, I have used 1click DVD that certainly puts the whole thing onto the flash drive, also Nero Burn a DVD (same thing) and even used a decrypter application but nothing seems to work.

Also tried drag 'n drop using (My) Computer but still no joy.

On the DVD machine, the title of the movie comes up OK but they PLAY button produces nothing.

[K7M]

I've done it on my 2gb flash drive with smaller vids. I just go into explorer and drag and drop the folder onto the flash drive. I then just open with power DVD which is the program I use to watch DVD's on my computer.

[fairnooks]

65% of a 6.1 gig file is right on top of the 4 gig limit for a file on a FAT32 file system, which I already suspected but you should have gotten an error message BEFORE it started to copy a file over that is too big.

Obviously you are not getting that error if 65% does copy over before it stops at 4 gigs.

I also run one and two gig video files on flash and have no problem so I think you should experiment with size. Shrink the results to under 4 gig by reducing quality or split the video in half and produce each segment seperately.

Or you can format the drive to NTFS file system and that should solve the problem if its a limit issue.

[cuttlefish]

Thanks again ..... I am slowly losing the plot!

Tried to format it using NTFS but it only does about 10% and says that "Windows Cannot Complete The Format" and promptly quits.

Geez, I was so proud of me Ebay Hong Kong deal on this flash drive - maybe not such a great deal after all!

[Soundy]

You'd be better off using something like Super DVD Ripper to convert the video clips to DivX or some similar format. .VOB files are MPEG-2, but a lot of players won't recognize them as such.

I've never managed to format a flash drive as NTFS, regardless of whether it was a brand-name or a cheap-*** no-name model. And of course, only another Windows 2000/XP/Vista machine would even be able to read the NTFS format.

[Rollin_Again]

All you have to do is manually rename the file from .vob extension to .mpg extension. I rip DVD's all the time and this is all I do in order to view the .vob files in Windows Media Player and my portable MPG player.

Regards,
Rollin

[Soundy]

That sort of works... except that the VOBs are limited to 2GB each, so a longer movie will be split up into several pieces. But yeah, each of those should fit nicely on a regular FAT32-formatted flash drive.

[fairnooks]

The file extension change almost always works in the case of VOBs with one accompanying audio channel in your native language.

I think everyone must have cheapo flash drives too because mine formatted to NTFS in 20 seconds flat. Maybe because it is only 8 gigs? I dunno, no problem though.