If you buy a new laptop or PC, you will not always find a DVD drive in it. For example, Chromebooks no longer offer a way to play your favorite CDs or DVDs. With these laptops, almost everything goes via the cloud. What if you still want to play a DVD? What are your options then?
1. Rip all your DVDs on a PC
If you don’t want to have anything to do with those (old-fashioned) discs at all, then a good option is to rip all your movies and save them digitally; whether this is on a hard disk or in the cloud. Of course, to convert DVDs to a video file, you must have a DVD drive and the necessary software to perform the process. It is therefore best to do this on a desktop PC, if you have it of course.
If you want to get started with ripping DVDs, read our extensive manual. Keep in mind that it is a time consuming process, and it will take up a lot of disk space if you are converting tens (if not hundreds) of DVDs. Once you’ve done this, however, you’ll never have to worry about missing a DVD drive in your Macbook or Windows-Laptop.
Depending on the file format you converted to, you need to have a suitable media player to play the files. We recommend VLC; a free media player that can not only play all video files, the software is also available for smartphones and tablets. Handy if you have all your files in the cloud and want to view them on your mobile devices.
2. Use an external DVD drive
The most obvious option, of course, is to just buy an external DVD drive. For a few tens you already get such a box in your house, so you always have something at hand when you want to watch an old film on your modern laptop, for example, or play that classic game again.
Connect the external DVD drive to a USB port on your laptop and it will likely work immediately after the necessary drivers are installed automatically. If for some reason this is not the case, please visit the manufacturer’s website and download the necessary drivers for the hardware.
Tip
If you don’t want to spend too much money on an external drive, a cheap alternative is to tinker a DVD drive from an old laptop or PC. If you take the DVD drive out of your old computer, you will have to purchase a suitable housing for it; available for little use through various webshops. Please note that this cover has the correct thickness and is suitable for the connections of your DVD drive (SATA / IDE, etc.). In this way you have built an external DVD drive relatively cheaply – and simply. You can do the same with a flatline DVD drive from an old laptop.
3. Use a USB stick or the cloud
Do you miss a DVD drive especially for copying files and media? Consider doing this with a USB stick from now on. Not only is this a lot faster than burning to a physical disc, it will also save you a lot of money in the long run.
Another option is the cloud. Services like Dropbox, SkyDrive, Mega and Google Drive make it very easy to upload files to their servers, after which you can access them on any device and anywhere. Useful: You can also share the files with many of these cloud services. If you only want to send files occasionally, this is also Dutch WeTransfer a great service to send files (free up to 2 GB).
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